3D viscoelastic full waveform inversion of seismic waves for geotechnical site investigation

Abstract

Full waveform inversion (FWI) methods are becoming efficient geophysical tools for geotechnical site investigation. They rely on a mathematical description of wave propagation phenomena to generate synthetic wave-fields, which are then matched with measured wave-fields for extraction of material properties. Due to the inherent computational challenges in implementing a viscoelastic treatment of the wave propagation phenomena, most of the existing 3D FWI algorithms are based on an elastic treatment, and hence ignore the anelastic behavior of materials. The focus of this study is to account for the anelastic effect of materials in the inversion analysis to improve inverted results. Therefore, a 3D viscoelastic FWI method is developed and tested on synthetic and field datasets. The method is based on an existing solution of 3D viscoelastic wave equations (finite-difference solver SOFI3D) and the adjoint-state inversion approach. The results show that the viscoelastic waveform analysis was able to characterize low- and high-velocity synthetic layers, and real variable soil layers. The S-wave velocity (Vs) profiles from field experiment generally agree with invasive standard penetration test (SPT) N-values, including identification of a low-velocity zone. Vs profiles obtained from a 3D elastic FWI are also included for comparison, and results from the viscoelastic inversion are more consistent with the SPT N-values in both trend and magnitudes.