Synthesis of earthquake-generated T-waves

T-phases excited by earthquakes propagate with low transmission loss along the ocean sound channel, and are characterized by long duration wavetrains, often having multiple peaks associated with bathymetric highs in the sourc e region. Although T-waves were first identified almost fifty years ago, th eir activation has not been adequately explained. In this paper we show tha t, for continental margin earthquakes, realistic T-phase coda can be comput ed by expressing the acoustic energy in terms of several low order modes ex cited by point sources distributed uniformly over the seafloor. The convers ion of seismic energy to acoustic energy is thus consistent with seafloor s cattering.