Stepsize sharing in time-lapse full-waveform inversion

Abstract

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) methods can produce high-resolution images of the physical properties of the subsurface. FWI has become a powerful tool for time-lapse or 4D seismic inversion, with applications in the monitoring of reservoir changes with injection and production, and potentially long-term storage of carbon. Current time-lapse FWI strategies include the parallel strategy (PRS), the sequential strategy, the double-difference strategy (DDS), the common-model strategy (CMS), and the central-difference strategy (CDS). PRS time-lapse inversion is affected by convergence differences between the baseline and monitoring inversions, as well as nonrepeatable noise and nonrepeatable acquisition geometries between surveys. The other strategies are largely efforts to fix the sensitivities of PRS, but robust solutions are still sought. We hypothesize that several problems in time-lapse FWI arise from the independence of step lengths during updating. This is supported by synthetic data tests, which indicate that stepsize sharing reduces artifacts caused by the variability in PRS convergence. Two strategies, which we refer to as stepsize-sharing PRS (SSPRS) and stepsize-sharing CMS, are then designed to address these remaining issues. In this paper, we have tested our methods in five scenarios, including noise-free data, nonrepeated noises, nonrepeatable source positions, biased starting models, and a combination of the latter three. The comparisons between the SSPRS and other strategies indicate that the SSPRS can adapt to all tested scenarios well. Especially, except for the DDS which is extremely sensitive to the nonrepeatable source positions, only the SSPRS can provide meaningful results in the latter two scenarios when compared with others. Furthermore, given that SSPRS through its sharing incurs half of the time cost of seeking stepsizes compared with the PRS and DDS, the total computational cost of SSPRS is less than half of that of the CMS and CDS.