First-arrival traveltime tomography based on the adjoint-state method

Abstract

Classical algorithms used for traveltime tomography are not necessarily well suited for handling very large seismic data sets or for taking advantage of current supercomputers. The classical approach of first-arrival traveltime tomography was revisited with the proposal of a simple gradient-based approach that avoids ray tracing and estimation of the Fréchet derivative matrix. The key point becomes the derivation of the gradient of the misfit function obtained by the adjoint-state technique. The adjoint-state method is very attractive from a numerical point of view because the associated cost is equivalent to the solution of the forward-modeling problem, whatever the size of the input data and the number of unknown velocity parameters. An application on a 2D synthetic data set demonstrated the ability of the algorithm to image near-surface velocities with strong vertical and lateral variations and revealed the potential of the method.