A Breviary of Seismic Tomography

This is the first textbook to cover all the major aspects of seismic tomography at a level accessible to students. While focusing on applications in solid earth geophysics, the book also includes numerous excursions into helioseismology in order to demonstrate the strong affinity between the two fields. The book presents a comprehensive introduction to seismic tomography including the basic theory of wave propagation, the ray and Born approximations required for interpretation of amplitudes, travel times and phases, eigenvibrations and surface waves, observational methods, model parametrization, finite-frequency methods, inversion, error and resolution analysis, and seismic anisotropy. It presents in-depth consideration of observational aspects of the subject, as well as practical recommendations for implementing numerical models using publicly available software. Written by one of the leaders in the field, and containing numerous student exercises, this textbook is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. It is also an invaluable guide for seismology research practitioners in geophysics and astronomy. Solutions to the exercises, and a link to the author’s tomographic software and user manual are available online from www.cambridge.org/9780521882446.