Computationally efficient 3-D frequency-domain full waveform inversion (FWI) is applied to ocean-bottom cable data from the Valhall oil field in the visco-acoustic vertical transverse isotropic (VTI) approximation. Frequency-domain seismic modelling is performed with a parallel sparse direct solver on a limited number of computer nodes. A multiscale imaging is performed by successive inversions of single frequencies in the 3.5-10 Hz frequency band. The vertical wave speed is updated during FWI while density, quality factor Q P and anisotropic Thomsen's parameters δ and are kept fixed to their initial values. The final FWI model shows the resolution improvement that was achieved compared to the initial model that was built by reflection traveltime tomography. This FWI model shows a glacial channel system at 175 m depth, the footprint of drifting icebergs on the palaeo-seafloor at 500 m depth, a detailed view of a gas cloud at 1 km depth and the base cretaceous reflector at 3.5 km depth. The relevance of the FWI model is assessed by frequency-domain and time-domain seismic modelling and source wavelet estimation. The agreement between the modelled and recorded data in the frequency domain is excellent up to 10 Hz although amplitudes of modelled wavefields propagating across the gas cloud are overestimated. This might highlight the footprint of attenuation, whose absorption effects are underestimated by the homogeneous background Q P model (Q P = 200). The match between recorded and modelled time-domain seismograms suggests that the inversion was not significantly hampered by cycle skipping. However, late arrivals in the synthetic seismograms, computed without attenuation and with a source wavelet estimated from short-offset early arrivals, arrive 40 ms earlier than the recorded seismograms. This might result from dispersion effects related to attenuation. The repeatability of the source wavelets inferred from data that are weighted by a linear gain with offset is dramatically improved when they are estimated in the FWI model rather than in the smooth initial model. The two source wavelets, estimated in the FWI model from data with and without offset gain, show a 40 ms time-shift, which is consistent with the previous analysis of the time-domain seismograms. The computational efficiency of our frequency-domain approach is assessed against a recent time-domain FWI case study performed in a similar geological environment. This analysis highlights the efficiency of the frequency-domain approach to process a large number of sources and receivers with limited computational resources, thanks to the efficiency of the substitution step performed by the direct solver. This efficiency can be further improved by using a block-low rank version of the multifrontal solver and by exploiting the sparsity of the source vectors during the substitution step. Future work will aim to update attenuation and density at the same time of the vertical wave speed.

Wide-azimuth long-offset ocean bottom cable (OBC)/ocean bottom node surveys provide a suitable framework to perform computationally efficient frequency-domain full-waveform inversion (FWI) with a few discrete frequencies. Frequency-domain seismic modeling is performed efficiently with moderate computational resources for a large number of sources with a sparse multifrontal direct solver (Gauss-elimination techniques for sparse matrices). Approximate solutions of the time-harmonic wave equation are computed using a block low-rank (BLR) approximation, leading to a significant reduction in the operation count and in the volume of communication during the lower upper (LU) factorization as well as offering great potential for reduction in the memory demand. Moreover, the sparsity of the seismic source vectors is exploited to speed up the forward elimination step during the computation of the monochromatic wavefields. The relevance and the computational efficiency of the frequency-domain FWI performed in the viscoacoustic vertical transverse isotropic (VTI) approximation was tested with a real 3D OBC case study from the North Sea. The FWI subsurface models indicate a dramatic resolution improvement relative to the initial model built by reflection traveltime tomography. The amplitude errors introduced in the modeled wavefields by the BLR approximation for different low-rank thresholds have a negligible footprint in the FWI results. With respect to a standard multifrontal sparse direct factorization, and without compromise of the accuracy of the imaging, the BLR approximation can bring a reduction of the LU factor size by a factor of up to three. This reduction is not yet exploited to reduce the effective memory usage (ongoing work). The flop reduction can be larger than a factor of 10 and can bring a factor of time reduction of around three. Moreover, this reduction factor tends to increase with frequency, namely with the matrix size. Frequency-domain viscoacoustic VTI FWI can be viewed as an efficient tool to build an initial model for elastic FWI of 4C OBC data.

D frequency-domain full waveform inversion (FWI) is applied on North Sea wide-azimuth ocean-bottom cable data at low frequencies (≤10 Hz) to jointly update vertical wave speed, density and quality factor Q in the viscoacoustic VTI approximation. We assess whether density and Q should be viewed as proxy to absorb artefacts resulting from approximate wave physics or are valuable for interpretation in the presence of soft sediments and gas cloud. FWI is performed in the frequency domain to account for attenuation easily. Multiparameter frequency-domain FWI is efficiently performed with a few discrete frequencies following a multiscale frequency continuation. However, grouping a few frequencies during each multiscale step is necessary to mitigate acquisition footprint and match dispersive shallow guided waves. Q and density absorb a significant part of the acquisition footprint hence cleaning the velocity model from this pollution. Low Q perturbations correlate with low-velocity zones associated with soft sediments and gas cloud. However, the amplitudes of the Q perturbations show significant variations when the inversion tuning is modified. This dispersion in the Q reconstructions is however not passed on the velocity parameter suggesting that cross-talks between first-order kinematic and second-order dynamic parameters are limited. The density model shows a good match with a well log at shallow depths. Moreover, the impedance built a posteriori from the FWI velocity and density models shows a well-focused image with however local differences with the velocity model near the sea bed where density might have absorbed elastic effects. The FWI models are finally assessed against time-domain synthetic seismogram modelling performed with the same frequency-domain modelling engine used for FWI.