An application of FWI to deep water Hernando NAZ streamer data in Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

Summary We applied Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) to a karst and gas chimney area from Hernando 3D Narrow-Azimuth (NAZ) deep-water streamer data in the Gulf of Mexico. Karst distributes locally and has low velocity and large velocity contrast against surrounding sediments. FWI is an attractive tool for velocity modeling in this area. FWI detected a low-velocity karst zone which matches the Kirchhoff image. The convergence of FWI was confirmed by comparing seismograms and phases between observed and synthetic data. FWI improved the depth migration image quality and the flatness of common image gathers.