Deriving P-wave Near-surface Models from Exploration Data

Abstract

SUMMARYAdequate handling of the near surface is crucial for proper imaging of land data, especially for complex overburdens. Recently we introduced modal elastic inversion (Ernst 2013): approximate FWI which inverts P-guided waves to near-surface P-velocity models. We will present two case studies of modal elastic inversion of P-guided waves to obtain near-surface velocity models. The results show that this inversion approach can give realistic results not only for modern high-end densely sampled surveys, but also for sparse legacy dynamite surveys.