My master thesis: Receiver function modeling

Introduction
After many years of studies I have finally finished my degree in in geophysics from the University of Copenhagen. It all ended when I handed in my thesis the 15 December and defended it the 5 February. The thesis can be downloaded here: thesis.pdf (11 mb)

Abstract
Receiver function analysis is a seismic method utilizing that fact that seismic P-waves impinging on a subsurface boundary will result in refracted and reflected P and S-waves. The generated waves are only the result of the local structure and by deconvolution the local effect can be isolated in a data set called the receiver function. Reconstructing the local velocity-structure by comparing the observed receiver functions with synthetically generated receiver functions is usually regarded as a highly non-linear inverse problem. In this thesis I will apply four different algorithms to recreate the subsurface velocity structure from a synthetic data set as well as data collected in Greenland. The algorithms are: Uniform search, the Metropolis algorithm, Neighborhood search and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. Overall, the algorithms were successfully in reconstructing the synthetic data. In the Greenland data set the algorithms generated models indicating a low velocity layer which is most likely an artifact of the difference between the wavelet used in the forward algorithm and the wavelet embedded in the data. This problem affected all the algorithms. For the Greenland data only the Metropolis and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm found reasonable models. It was also concluded that the Uniform search and the Neighborhood algorithm do not perform well in high dimensional problems.

Thesis defense presentation
As well as the thesis it self the defense is made in LaTeX using the Beamer class. I used the program impressive to present the pdf, see Impressive – presentation using pdf and python | tjansson.dk.

The defense presentation can be downloaded here: thesis-defense.pdf (8.7 mb)