3D elastic full waveform inversion using P-wave excitation amplitude: Application to OBC field data

We propose an efficient elastic full waveform inversion (FWI) based on the P-wave excitation amplitude (maximum energy arrival) approximation in the source wavefields. Because, based on the P-wave excitation approximation (ExA), the gradient direction is approximated by the cross-correlation of source and receiver wavefields at only excitation time, it estimates the gradient direction faster than its conventional counterpart. In addition to this computational speedup, the P-wave excitation approximation automatically ignores SP and SS correlations in the approximated gradient direction. In elastic FWI for ocean bottom cable (OBC) data, the descent direction for the S-wave velocity is often degraded by undesired long-wavelength features from the SS correlation. For this reason, the P-wave excitation approach increases the convergence rate of multi-parameter FWI compared to the conventional approach. The modified 2D Marmousi model with OBC acquisition is used to verify the differences between the conventional method and ExA. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated on a real OBC data from North Sea.