SVD for multioffset linearized inversion: Resolution analysis in multicomponent acquisition

Abstract

Acquisition of the full elastic response (compressional and shear) of the subsurface is an important technology in the seismic industry because of its potential to improve the quality of seismic data and to infer accurate information about rock properties (fluid type and rock lithology). In the framework of 3-D propagation in 1-D media, we propose a computational tool to analyze the information about elastic parameters contained in the amplitudes of reflected waves with offset. The approach is based on singular value decomposition (SVD) analysis of the linearized elastic inversion problem and can be applied to any particular seismic data. We applied this tool to examine the type of information in the model space that can be retrieved from sea‐bottom multicomponent measurements. The results are compared with those obtained from conventional streamer acquisition techniques. We also present multiparameter linearized inversion results obtained from synthetic data that illustrate the resolution of elastic parameters. This approach allows us to investigate the reliability of the elastic parameters estimated for different offset ranges, wave modes, data types, and noise levels involved in data space.