Elastic reflection waveform inversion with variable density

Yuanyuan Li, Zhenchun Li, Tariq Ali Alkhalifah, Qiang Guo

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Elastic full waveform inversion (FWI) provides a better description of the subsurface than those given by the acoustic assumption. However it suffers from a more serious cycle skipping problem compared with the latter. Reflection waveform inversion (RWI) provides a method to build a good background model, which can serve as an initial model for elastic FWI. Therefore, we introduce the concept of RWI for elastic media, and propose elastic RWI with variable density. We apply Born modeling to generate the synthetic reflection data by using optimized perturbations of P- and S-wave velocities and density. The inversion for the perturbations in P- and S-wave velocities and density is similar to elastic least-squares reverse time migration (LSRTM). An incorrect initial model will lead to some misfits at the far offsets of reflections; thus, can be utilized to update the background velocity. We optimize the perturbation and background models in a nested approach. Numerical tests on the Marmousi model demonstrate that our method is able to build reasonably good background models for elastic FWI with absence of low frequencies, and it can deal with the variable density, which is needed in real cases.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2017
PublisherSociety of Exploration Geophysicists
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 17 2017

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01
Acknowledgements: We thank KAUST for its support and SWAG for collaborative environment. The authors would like to thank the China Scholarship Council for supporting the study. This research is also sponsored by Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (16CX06039A).

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