Guust Nolet

Frederik J. Simons, Ignace Loris, Guust Nolet et al.

We propose a class of spherical wavelet bases for the analysis of geophysical models and forthe tomographic inversion of global seismic data. Its multiresolution character allows for modeling with an effective spatial resolution that varies with position within the Earth. Our procedure is numerically efficient and can be implemented with parallel computing. We discuss two possible types of discrete wavelet transforms in the angular dimension of the cubed sphere. We discuss benefits and drawbacks of these constructions and apply them to analyze the information present in two published seismic wavespeed models of the mantle, for the statistics and power of wavelet coefficients across scales. The localization and sparsity properties of wavelet bases allow finding a sparse solution to inverse problems by iterative minimization of a combination of the $\ell_2$ norm of data fit and the $\ell_1$ norm on the wavelet coefficients. By validation with realistic synthetic experiments we illustrate the likely gains of our new approach in future inversions of finite-frequency seismic data and show its readiness for global seismic tomography.

Sergey Voronin, Dylan Mikesell, Guust Nolet

We introduce and compare new compression approaches to obtain regularized solutions of large linear systems which are commonly encountered in large scale inverse problems. We first describe how to approximate matrix vector operations with a large matrix through a sparser matrix with fewer nonzero elements, by borrowing from ideas used in wavelet image compression. Next, we describe and compare approaches based on the use of the low rank SVD, which can result in further size reductions. We describe how to obtain the approximate low rank SVD of the original matrix using the sparser wavelet compressed matrix. Some analytical results concerning the various methods are presented and the results of the proposed techniques are illustrated using both synthetic data and a very large linear system from a seismic tomography application, where we obtain significant compression gains with our methods, while still resolving the main features of the solutions.