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Abstract

Definition: Receiver function. Response of the Earth’s structure below seismic stations to incident teleseismic waves. Seismic discontinuities in the Earth’s crust or upper mantle cause waves from distant earthquakes to be converted from P to S waves or vice versa, or to be multiply reflected between discontinuities before arriving the stations. Such scattered waves carry information about the seismic structure of the lithosphere and upper mantle. Scattered waves are weak signals and summation of many records is usually required to visualize the useful information.