First arrival traveltime and waveform inversion of refraction data

For CDP refraction data, does first-arrival waveform tomography provide significantly better results than ray based tomography? To answer this question, both the ray-based traveltimc tomography method and waveform inversion arc tested with synthetic and field refraction data. Synthetic results show that the waveform to mograms are much more resolved than the traveltimc tomogram, but at an increase of more than 2 orders of magnitude in computation time. The field data results show that this method can be used to locate salt diapirs and possible low-velocity tunnels. However, the acoustic waveform tomogram appears noisier than the ray-based traveltime tomogram. We expect that future experiments with improved regularization and viscoelastic modeling in the waveform inversion will lead to tomograms with much better resolution than the ray-based tomograms.