Near-surface modeling: A multiphysics approach

Abstract

With the growth in geographic scale of land seismic exploration, increasingly complex near-surface modeling capabilities are being employed for static corrections in data processing. Variations in subsurface properties can be detected by gravity and electromagnetic measurements. The principles of complementarity and of noncontradiction are employed to integrate the diverse sources of information in a cooperative or simultaneous joint inversion formalism. In common practice, geophysical methods are subject to equivalency in solution. Also, inversions of first breaks are based on the user's interpretation of early arrivals, and, therefore, they are exposed to systematic errors, especially if picking is automated as for large 3D data sets. In such circumstances, it is desirable to avoid overfitting of observations in inversion. Velocity models developed through a multiphysics approach do not suffer from velocity-depth ambiguity and provide a shallow model that is well protected from the influence of inaccuracy in seismic picking.