Moho topography beneath the northern Manila subduction using differential evolution algorithm

SUMMARY Moho topography model of subduction zones is an important component of deep tectonics and an important basis for verifying geodynamic processes. As one of the main factors affecting the accuracy of Moho topography model inverted by gravity method, the selection of inversion parameters suffers from the effect of nonlinear terms, which need to be reduced by constraints. Therefore, we applied the differential evolutionary algorithm to compute the inversion parameters and obtained a refined Moho topographic model of North Manila subduction on this basis. Synthetic tests show that the differential evolution algorithm can effectively mitigate the impact of nonlinear terms. With or without noise, the differential evolution algorithm is effective in finding better inversion parameters compared to the linear regression method. Particularly in Moho density contrast, the average value obtained from multiple runs of differential evolution algorithm still achieved a 54.4 per cent improvement in accuracy. In practical application, the comparison results show that the RMS of the difference between this paper's model and all seismic control points is 2.37 km with an improvement of at least 35.1 per cent, which proves that this paper's method is reliable. Furthermore, we examined the impact of various parameters on the method to validate its robustness.