A Quality Control Method for Teleseismic<i>P</i>‐Wave Receiver Functions

Abstract

We introduce a new semiautomated quality control (QC) method for teleseismic P ‐wave receiver functions consisting of 13 editing procedures. These procedures are categorized into three groups based on (1) deconvolution attributes, (2) characteristics of each receiver function, and (3) the statistical attributes of a station gather. We evaluated the efficacy of individual procedure and combination of multiple procedures by applying them to receiver functions estimated from the EarthScope Ozark–Illinois–Indiana–Kentucky experiment for the Illinois basin area, and 10 years of USArray Transportable Array data for the contiguous United States. The method developed in this study significantly improves the efficiency and accuracy of receiver function QC. Our approach has three useful properties: (1) unlike a manual editing method, our approach produces reproducible results defined by a finite set of tunable parameters; (2) it provides an effective and efficient tool for processing large datasets containing millions of receiver functions; (3) the QC procedures are less dependent on phase similarities comparing to the automated scheme used by the EarthScope Automated Receiver Survey while producing comparable common conversion point stacking images.