No abstract

Parameterization lies at the center of anisotropic full-waveform inversion (FWI) with multiparameter updates. This is because FWI aims to update the long and short wavelengths of the perturbations. Thus, it is important that the parameterization accommodates this. Recently, there has been an intensive effort to determine the optimal parameterization, centering the fundamental discussion mainly on the analysis of radiation patterns for each one of these parameterizations, and aiming to determine which is best suited for multiparameter inversion. We have developed a new parameterization in the scope of FWI, based on the concept of kinematically equivalent media, as originally proposed in other areas of seismic data analysis. Our analysis is also based on radiation patterns, as well as the relation between the perturbation of this set of parameters and perturbation in traveltime. The radiation pattern reveals that this parameterization combines some of the characteristics of parameterizations with one velocity and two Thomsen's parameters and parameterizations using two velocities and one Thomsen's parameter. The study of perturbation of traveltime with perturbation of model parameters shows that the new parameterization is less ambiguous when relating these quantities in comparison with other more commonly used parameterizations. We have concluded that our new parameterization is well-suited for inverting diving waves, which are of paramount importance to carry out practical FWI successfully. We have demonstrated that the new parameterization produces good inversion results with synthetic and real data examples. In the latter case of the real data example from the Central North Sea, the inverted models show good agreement with the geologic structures, leading to an improvement of the seismic image and flatness of the common image gathers.

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) includes migration and tomography modes. The tomographic component of the gradient from reflection data is usually much weaker than the migration component. To use the tomography mode to fix background velocity errors, it is necessary to extract the tomographic component from the gradient. Otherwise, the inversion will be dominated by the migration mode. We have developed a method based on nonstationary smoothing to extract the tomographic component from the raw gradient. By analyzing the characteristics of the scattering angle filtering, the wavenumber of the tomographic component at a given frequency is seen to be smaller than that of the migration component. Therefore, low-wavenumber-pass filtering can be applied to extract the tomographic component. The low-wavenumber-pass smoothing filters are designed with Gaussian filters that are determined by the frequency of inversion, the model velocity, and the minimum scattering angle. Thus, this filtering is nonstationary smoothing in the space domain. Because this filtering is carried out frequency by frequency, it works naturally and efficiently for FWI based on frequency-domain modeling. Furthermore, because the maximum opening angle of the reflections in a typical acquisition geometry is much smaller than the minimum scattering angle for the tomographic component, which is generally set at 160°, there is a relatively large gap between the wavenumbers of the tomographic and migration components. In other words, the nonstationary smoothing can be applied once to a group of frequencies for time-domain FWI without leaking the migration component into the tomographic component. Analyses and numerical tests indicate that two frequency groups are generally sufficient to extract the tomographic component for the typical frequency range of time-domain FWI. The numerical tests also demonstrate that the nonstationary smoothing method is effective and efficient at extracting the tomographic component for reflection waveform inversion.

We present a method for the automatic estimation of the trade-off parameter in the context of wavefield reconstruction inversion (WRI). WRI formulates the inverse problem as an optimisation problem, minimising the data misfit while penalising with a wave equation constraining term. The trade-off between the two terms is balanced by a scaling factor that balances the contributions of the data-misfit term and the constraining term to the value of the objective function. If this parameter is too large then it implies penalizing for the wave equation imposing a hard constraint in the inversion. If it is too small, then this leads to a poorly constrained solution as it is essentially penalizing for the data misfit and not taking into account the physics that explains the data. This paper introduces a new approach for the formulation of WRI recasting its formulation into a multiplicative cost function. We demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the additive cost function when the trade-off parameter is appropriately scaled in the latter, when adapting it throughout the iterations, and when the data is contaminated with Gaussian random noise. Thus this work contributes with a framework for a more automated application of WRI.

Full‐waveform inversion (FWI) includes both migration and tomography modes. The migration mode acts like a nonlinear least squares migration to map model interfaces with reflections, while the tomography mode behaves as tomography to build a background velocity model. The migration mode is the main response of inverting reflections, while the tomography mode exists in response to inverting both the reflections and refractions. To emphasize one of the two modes in FWI, especially for inverting reflections, the separation of the two modes in the gradient of FWI is required. Here we present a new method to achieve this separation with an angle‐dependent filtering technique in the plane wave domain. We first transform the source and residual wavefields into the plane wave domain with the Fourier transform and then decompose them into the migration and tomography components using the opening angles between the transformed source and residual plane waves. The opening angles close to 180° contribute to the tomography component, while the others correspond to the migration component. We find that this approach is very effective and robust even when the medium is relatively complicated with strong lateral heterogeneities, highly dipping reflectors, and strong anisotropy. This is well demonstrated by theoretical analysis and numerical tests with a synthetic data set and a field data set.