We present the first in a series of dataset and model assessment products for investigating Africa’s lithosphere (ADAMA). This is a comprehensive catalog of short‐period interstation surface‐wave dispersion measurements and uncertainties. It is derived from processing continuous recordings of all publicly available three‐component seismograms, spanning four decades, from ∼1372 stations, across 62 seismic networks deployed in and around the African continent. It includes Love‐ and Rayleigh‐wave dispersion derived from frequency‐domain ambient noise cross‐correlation functions (NCFs). Phase and group dispersion, as well as their uncertainties, are then obtained with an iterative nonlinear waveform fitting of the NCFs, using a spectral element representation of a path‐average a priori Earth model. Our catalog represents the following advances: (1) a large distribution of short period dispersion measurements: ∼114,000 interstation pairs at periods between 5 s and 40 s, (2) inclusion of uncertainties useful for regularization in continent‐wide model building, (3) preliminary model assessments for different tectonic domains on the continent, and (4) an exemplary Love‐wave phase velocity map obtained by Bayesian inversion revealing detailed features not previously detected. ADAMA will be used to prepare short‐period, high‐resolution dispersion maps, and for assessment and updates of widely used seismic velocity models of the crust across a diversity of terranes on the continent.
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