Reconciliation of techniques, models and data has emerged as a frontier area for deep Earth exploration. Past results have proven indispensable for assessing earthquake hazard, characterizing plate tectonics, elucidating material properties under extreme conditions, imaging interior structure, and as a general reference in other fields. We present advancements on a three-dimensional reference Earth model (REM3D) that captures the consensus view of heterogeneity in the mantle.

Progress in modeling the Earth’s interior is driven by diverse data, ranging from astronomic-geodetic constraints to full seismic waveforms and derivative measurements of body waves (~ 1 – 20s), surface waves (~ 20 – 300s) and normal modes (~ 250 – 3000s). Reconciliation of data involves retrieving the missing metadata, archiving in scalable storage formats, documenting outliers indicative of the limitations in some techniques, and quantifying summary reference data with uncertainties. Building on our recent work on reference surface-wave dispersion datasets, arrival times of primary, diffracted, and reflected phases from the transition-zone and deeper discontinuities are reconciled for a body-wave reference dataset. This procedure involves revised techniques and archival formats for the processing of frequency-dependent arrival times. A revised dataset of normal-mode eigenfrequencies, quality factors and splitting is reconciled with updated uncertainties based on inter-catalog consistencies.

Full-spectrum tomography uses these diverse observations to constrain physical properties – seismic velocity, anisotropy, density, attenuation and the topography of discontinuities – in variable spatial resolution. This technique is expanded to include long-wavelength geoid as an additional constraint on density variations. All geoscience workflows typically involve querying data or models in order to make inferences. Analysis and Visualization toolkit for plaNetary Inferences (AVNI) is a web-based software environment powered by Python that facilitates these computational workflows. AVNI tools are web-based so that the shared resources are accessed by authenticated users through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), without the overhead of storing data, compiling and running intensive codes.

Global variations in the propagation of fundamental-mode and overtone surface waves provide unique constraints on the low-frequency source properties and structure of the Earth’s upper mantle, transition zone and mid mantle. We construct a reference data set of multimode dispersion measurements by reconciling large and diverse catalogues of Love-wave (49.65 million) and Rayleigh-wave dispersion (177.66 million) from eight groups worldwide. The reference data set summarizes measurements of dispersion of fundamental-mode surface waves and up to six overtone branches from 44 871 earthquakes recorded on 12 222 globally distributed seismographic stations. Dispersion curves are specified at a set of reference periods between 25 and 250 s to determine propagation-phase anomalies with respect to a reference Earth model. Our procedures for reconciling data sets include: (1) controlling quality and salvaging missing metadata; (2) identifying discrepant measurements and reasons for discrepancies; (3) equalizing geographic coverage by constructing summary rays for travel-time observations and (4) constructing phase velocity maps at various wavelengths with combination of data types to evaluate inter-dataset consistency. We retrieved missing station and earthquake metadata in several legacy compilations and codified scalable formats to facilitate reproducibility, easy storage and fast input/output on high-performance-computing systems. Outliers can be attributed to cycle skipping, station polarity issues or overtone interference at specific epicentral distances. By assessing inter-dataset consistency across similar paths, we empirically quantified uncertainties in traveltime measurements. More than 95 per cent measurements of fundamental-mode dispersion are internally consistent, but agreement deteriorates for overtones especially branches 5 and 6. Systematic discrepancies between raw phase anomalies from various techniques can be attributed to discrepant theoretical approximations, reference Earth models and processing schemes. Phase-velocity variations yielded by the inversion of the summary data set are highly correlated (R ≥ 0.8) with those from the quality-controlled contributing data sets. Long-wavelength variations in fundamental-mode dispersion (50–100 s) are largely independent of the measurement technique with high correlations extending up to degree ∼25. Agreement degrades with increasing branch number and period; highly correlated structure is found only up to degree ∼10 at longer periods (T \> 150 s) and up to degree ∼8 for overtones. Only 2ζ azimuthal variations in phase velocity of fundamental-mode Rayleigh waves were required by the reference data set; maps of 2ζ azimuthal variations are highly consistent between catalogues ( R = 0.6–0.8). Reference data with uncertainties are useful for improving existing measurement techniques, validating models of interior structure, calculating teleseismic data corrections in local or multiscale investigations and developing a 3-D reference Earth model.