Crustal and uppermost mantle shear-wave velocity structure beneath the Middle East by ambient-noise and surface-wave tomography

The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments and suggestions that improved the initial and revised versions of the manuscript. This study was possible thanks to the availability of continuous daily record of seismic noise from permanent and temporary stations operating in the region. Data was provided by different seismological networks and data centers. The Iranian Seismological Center (Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran) and International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (IIEES) gratefully provided the daily noise record from the permanent broadband stations in Iran. Continuous records from Kandilli Observatory Digital Broadband Seismic Network (doi: 10.7914/SN/KO, Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, Bosphorus Univ. (2001)) and Israeli Broadband Seismological Network (GII-Net, network code IS) were downloaded from the European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA). The facilities of IRIS Data Services and specifically the IRIS Data Management Center were used to access data of temporary stations and global permanent stations used in this study. IRIS Data Services are funded through the Seismological Facilities for the Advancement of Geoscience and EarthScope (SAGE) Proposal of the National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement EAR1261681. The seismological networks providing data to us via the IRIS data service are listed in the Supplementary Information. Rayleigh wave group-velocity dispersion data from the Saudi National Seismic Network (SNSN) operated by the Saudi Geological Survey was taken from previous studies (Tang et al., 2018, 2019) of the seismology group (PMM and ZT) from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). PMM and ZT were supported by grant BAS/1/1339-01-01 funded by the KAUST. We adopted the algorithm introduced by Boue et al. (2014) and used the WHISPER software package (Briand et al., 2013) to preprocess individual daily vertical-component records. Seismic analysis was conducted using the routines implemented in the Python package ObsPy (Beyreuther et al, 2010). The maps shown in the paper were created using the Generic Mapping Tools (Wessel et al., 2013). S.P. acknowledges support from Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) grant NE/R013500/1 and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 790203. S.P. is grateful to the NCM for providing continuous passive seismic data used in this study.