Full‐waveform inversion of plane‐wave seismograms in stratified acoustic media: Theory and feasibility

Abstract

We have implemented an inversion procedure for obtaining velocity and density profiles from multioffset data in a layered acoustic medium. Using an iterative modeling technique and the p-τ representation, the procedure is derived from the nonlinear least‐squares formalism of Tarantola and Valette. The feasibility of this method depends upon obtaining Fréchet derivatives during the modeling process and on vectorizing the Thompson‐Haskell reflectivity algorithm. Test data sets for this study are gathers of two to four plane‐wave synthetic seismograms which may contain both precritical and postcritical arrivals generated by a seismic wavelet. These examples demonstrate convergence to the correct velocity and density profiles with reasonable accuracy.