Elastic Full-Waveform Inversion Using Migration-Based Depth Reflector Representation in the Data Domain

Abstract

The depth velocity model is a critical element for providing seismic data processing success, as it is responsible for the times of waves’ propagation and, therefore, prescribes the location of geological objects in the resulting seismic images. Constructing a deep velocity model is the most time-consuming part of the entire seismic data processing, which usually requires interactive human intervention. This article introduces the consistently numerical method for reconstructing a depth velocity model based on the modified version of the elastic Full Waveform Inversion (FWI). The specific feature of this approach to FWI is the decomposition of the space of admissible velocity models into subspaces of propagator (macro velocity) and reflector components. In turn, the latter transforms to the data space reflectivity on the base of migration transformation. Finally, we perform minimisation in two different spaces: (1) Macro velocity as a smooth spatial function; (2) Migration transforms data space reflectivity to the spatial reflectivity. We present numerical experiments confirming less sensitiveness of the modified version of FWI to the lack of the low time frequencies in the data acquired. In our computations, we use synthetic data with valuable time frequencies from 5 Hz.