Adjoint inversion of antipodal PKPab waveforms for P wave velocity anomaly at the base of the lower mantle

We perform an adjoint inversion by using antipodal PKPab phases to estimate the heterogeneous Vp structure at the base of the lowermost mantle. We have carefully examined antipodal stations with high S/N ratios during the past 30 years and selected 20 source-receiver pairs with the epicentral distances >179.0 degree and the Mw <7.0. We have used the spectral-element method on the Earth Simulator of JAMSTEC to calculate the synthetic seismograms for a heterogeneous mantle Vp model with the accuracy of period about 8 s (110 km wavelength at the CMB). We have set up the time window to retrieve the PKPab phase from the vertical component of both observed and computed seismograms to calculate the adjoint source to obtain the sensitivity kernels of Vp in the mantle. The computed Vp sensitivity kernel for each event shows the characteristic annulus pattern in the lowermost mantle, which covers a large area of the CMB. The twenty PKPab earthquake-station pairs in this antipodal study contribute the equivalent of about 3140 measurements at the CMB—compared with 1871 previously studied—and provide new data. Therefore, although the number of individual source-receiver pairs is not large, the summed sensitivity kernels of the PKPab phase for Vp structure at the base of the mantle may be sufficient to model heterogeneity of the Vp structure at the CMB. We summed each event kernel to set up a sensitivity kernel of Vp in the lowermost mantle and iterated the inversion to estimate a heterogeneous structure in D″. Although we have iterations that dominantly affect both South America and the South Pacific, the summary final model shows features within South of Africa, South Pacific, SE Australia, and Central & South America. Keeping the Vs model fixed, we map the CMB Vp heterogeneity measured by the parameter R s,p  =  dlnVs/dlnV p and find qualitative, proximal correspondence with the degree-2 pattern of Large Low Velocity Shear Provinces observed in shear tomographic models: in the Pacific and Africa R s,p  > 2.0, whereas the surrounding edges of the edges of the Pacific show R s,p  < 2.0.