Region-related features of crustal and upper-mantle velocity structure of the Chinese mainland detected by surface waveform modeling

Surface waveform modeling has played an important role on many continental-scale studies of upper mantle velocity structure, but it was seldom applied to the Chinese mainland study. The present study firstly analyzed surface waveform fittings for eight wave paths crossing through four different regions of the Chinese mainland (eastern, central, northern and western China), and then inverted for 1D path-averaged S-velocities for these paths. The inverted crustal and upper-mantle S-velocities showed obvious region-related features, which are well consistent with known geotectonic units and previous research results. These results indicate that surface waveform modeling is a reliable method to get crustal and upper-mantle velocity structure. Furthermore, this method has a prominent advantage in detecting upper-mantle structure compared with fundamental-mode surface-wave dispersion method.