🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenge of efficiently quantifying uncertainty in three-dimensional seismic traveltime tomography, which is hindered by ill-posed inversion and the curse of dimensionality. The authors propose a mesh-free Bayesian approach that integrates physics-informed neural networks with neural field representations of velocity structure, enabling efficient posterior sampling via functional-space particle variational inference. Analytical marginalization over passive-source parameters is incorporated to enhance computational tractability. This framework represents the first scalable Bayesian tomography method capable of jointly handling large-scale active- and passive-source data, substantially improving scalability and data efficiency. Validations on synthetic and real-world datasets from the Kii Peninsula offshore region successfully recover key geological structures with well-calibrated uncertainties; posterior source locations exhibit vertical offsets of 10–15 km, consistent with prior studies, while drastically reducing model storage requirements.
📝 Abstract
Accurate 3D seismic velocity modeling through seismic travel-time tomography using both active- and passive-source data provides critical underpinning models for seismicity monitoring and hazard assessment. Because travel-time tomography is an inherently ill-posed inverse problem, UQ of the estimated models using Bayesian methods is also important for reliable downstream interpretations and analyses. However, Bayesian inference for 3D tomography based on conventional grid-based representations faces the ``curse of dimensionality'' and severe computational bottlenecks. Consequently, rigorous Bayesian UQ for margin-wide 3D travel-time tomography has remained largely unexplored. In this study, we propose a meshless 3D Bayesian travel-time tomography method that combines PINNs with a neural representation of the velocity structure, enabling tractable and data-efficient Bayesian inference through function-space particle-based variational inference. To efficiently integrate passive-source data into the Bayesian estimation of the velocity structure, we conduct analytical marginalization treating uncertain source parameters as nuisance parameters, with passive-source relocation carried out in post-processing. We validated the capability of our approach for 3D problems through synthetic experiments. Furthermore, we applied the method to a real-world dataset from marine active-source surveys and natural earthquakes off the Kii Peninsula, Nankai Trough. Our probabilistic 3D ensemble successfully resolves key geological features and provides data-consistent uncertainty maps. The posterior mean hypocenters shifted mainly in the vertical direction by 10-15 km, consistent with a previous relocation result. Finally, the neural representation drastically reduces storage requirements for the entire ensemble velocity model, highlighting the scalability and data efficiency of the proposed framework.