Abstract
We present a parsimonious wave-equation travel-time inversion technique for refraction waves. A dense virtual refraction dataset can be generated from just two reciprocal shot gathers for the sources at the endpoints of the survey line, with N geophones evenly deployed along the line. These two reciprocal shots contain approximately 2N refraction travel times, which can be spawned into O(N2) refraction travel times by an interferometric transformation. Then, these virtual refraction travel times are used with a source wavelet to create N virtual refraction shot gathers, which are the input data for wave-equation travel-time inversion. Numerical results show that the parsimonious wave-equation travel-time tomogram has about the same accuracy as the tomogram computed by standard wave-equation travel-time inversion. The most significant benefit is that a reciprocal survey is far less time consuming than the standard refraction survey where a source is excited at each geophone location.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1452-1461 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Geophysical Prospecting |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 14 2017 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: The research reported in this publication was supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. The authors would like to thank the sponsors of the Center for Subsurface Imaging and Modeling (CSIM) Consortium for their financial support. For computer time, this research used the resources of the Supercomputing Laboratory at KAUST and the IT Research Computing Group. The authors would like to thank them for providing the computational resources required for carrying out this work.