Diving-wave FWI methodology applied to a Colombian Caribbean data set

Abstract

Building accurate velocity models is of major interest for oil and gas companies because it improves the prospect evaluation and reduces the risk of geohazards. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has become a popular method for finding high-resolution and accurate velocity and has been successfully applied to several offshore case studies. We develop a methodology that allows us to apply diving-wave FWI to a case study from the Colombian Caribbean area. The proposed diving-wave FWI methodology includes the wavelet estimation, velocity updates, and quality control (QC) processes. The QC is performed using the cost function, the crosscorrelation of the observed and synthetic gathers, and the analytical trace information. The first QC tool indicates the difference between observed and synthetic gathers; the other two verify that the observed and synthetic data are not cycle skipped. The velocity model obtained with the proposed methodology is the first successful case study performed in the Colombian Caribbean region. From the obtained model, we conclude that FWI is able to build a velocity model with better-resolved shallow depth areas that assist the subsequent pore pressure prediction and imaging processes.