Acoustic Land Full Waveform Inversion on a Broadband Land Dataset: the Impact of Optimal Transport

Abstract

Summary While there are very few applications of land Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) compared to marine, modern on-shore wide azimuth, dense, broadband acquisition designs offer an outstanding opportunity for FWI application. Several successful examples of acoustic land FWI application to such surveys have been published. The first applications showed the potential of the approach as an early stage velocity model building tool. Later publications demonstrated that acoustic FWI can be used as an efficient model building tool for high resolution velocity models (similar in quality to marine FWI) by investing more effort in dedicated pre-processing and using a two stage workflow based on data selection (Sedova et al., 2017). We illustrate a new case study based on this workflow. We also demonstrate the impact of optimal transport (OT) FWI on the resulting velocity model, which aims to mitigate cycle skipping. We demonstrate how it corrects several localized failures with conventional FWI and constructs a geologically consistent velocity model.