Reducing uncertainty in geologic interpretation of petroleum reservoir containing thin layers requires increasing vertical resolution via appropriate advanced resolution enhancement methods. This problem was resolved here by introducing an alternative approach in resolution enhancement. Our method uses Gabor deconvolution (GD) combined with wavelet scaling. First, the seismic trace is transformed in the time-frequency domain using the Gabor transform. Subsequently, the Gabor magnitude spectrum of the seismic trace is smoothed to estimate the wavelet magnitude, which is then divided by the original value on the Gabor magnitude spectrum along the frequency axis to design a scale transformation filter. Finally, the filtered Gabor magnitude spectrum of the seismic trace is transformed back to the time domain using an inverse Gabor transformation. The result of using this technique is an increase of the dominant frequency, which produces a higher resolution of the seismic trace compared with using only the original GD. This method was applied to two synthetic and one field seismic data sets and compared with using only a GD. After applying the new approach, all three data sets indicate an extension in bandwidth (BW) and an enhancement in the resolution adequate for thin-layer seismic interpretation. When compared with the data sets using only a GD, the new approach produced comparable extension in the effective BW, while it pushing the dominant frequency to higher values. This allowed the imaging of many thin layers and geologic intervals in the field data example that could not be interpreted by the GD method.

In the presented study, multi-parameter inversion in the presence of attenuation is used for the reconstruction of the P- and the S- wave velocities and the density models of a synthetic shallow subsurface structure that contains a dipping high-velocity layer near the surface with varying thicknesses. The problem of high-velocity layers also complicates selection of an appropriate initial velocity model. The forward problem is solved with the finite difference, and the inverse problem is solved with the preconditioned conjugate gradient. We used also the adjoint wavefield approach for computing the gradient of the misfit function without explicitly build the sensitivity matrix. The proposed method is capable of either minimizing the least-squares norm of the data misfit or use the Born approximation for estimating partial derivative wavefields. It depends on which characteristics of the recorded data—such as amplitude, phase, logarithm of the complex-valued data, envelope in the misfit, or the linearization procedure of the inverse problem—are used. It showed that by a pseudo-viscoelastic time-domain full-waveform inversion, structures below the high-velocity layer can be imaged. However, by inverting attenuation of P- and S- waves simultaneously with the velocities and mass density, better results would be obtained.