Interferometric full-waveform inversion

Abstract

Velocity errors in the shallow part of the velocity model can lead to erroneous estimates of the full-waveform inversion (FWI) tomogram. If the location and topography of a reflector are known, then such a reflector can be used as a reference reflector to update the underlying velocity model. Reflections corresponding to this reference reflector are windowed in the data space. Windowed reference reflections are then crosscorrelated with reflections from deeper interfaces, which leads to partial cancellation of static errors caused by the overburden above the reference interface. Interferometric FWI (IFWI) is then used to invert the tomogram in the target region, by minimizing the normalized waveform misfit between the observed and predicted crosscorrelograms. Results with synthetic and field data with static errors above the reference interface indicate that an accurate tomogram can be inverted in areas lying within several wavelengths of the reference interface. IFWI can also be applied to synthetic time-lapse data to mitigate the nonrepeatability errors caused by time-varying overburden variations. The synthetic- and field-data examples demonstrate that IFWI can provide accurate tomograms when the near surface is ridden with velocity errors.