Curvelet-Based Joint Waveform and Envelope Inversion of Early-Arrival Imaging Shallow Geological Structure

Abstract

Abstract Near-surface imaging structures often plays a significant role in the field of environmental and engineering geophysics. Early-arrival waveform inversion (EWI) is state-of-the-art method to imaging near-surface structures due to its high resolution. However, the method faces with cycle-skipping issue which might lead to an unexpected local minimum. Envelope inversion (EI) could deal with this issue which contributes to the ultralow-frequency information extracted from the envelope but has a low resolution. We have developed a curvelet-based joint waveform and envelope inversion (CJWEI) method for inverting imaging near-surface velocity structures. By inverting two types of data, we are able to recover the low- and high-wavenumber structures and mitigate the cycle-skipping problem. Curvelet transform was used to decompose seismic data into different scales and provide a multiscale inversion strategy to further reduce non-uniqueness of waveform inversion efficiently. With synthetic test and real data application, we demonstrate that our method can constrain the anomalies and hidden layers in the shallow structure more efficiently as well as is robust in terms of noise. The proposed multiscale joint inversion offers a computational efficiency and high precision to imaging fine-scale shallow underground structures.