Estimation of the anisotropy parameters from imaging moveout of diving wave in a factorized anisotropic medium

Abstract

The importance of diving waves is being realized because they provide long-wavelength model information, which can be used to help invert for the reflection information in full-waveform inversion. The factorized model is defined here as a combination of vertical heterogeneity and constant anisotropy, and it admits closed-form description of the traveltime. We have used these resulting analytical formulas to describe the behavior of diving waves in a factorized anisotropic medium, and we used an approximate imaging moveout formulation (residual moveout after imaging) to update the velocity model when the wrong model parameters (isotropic assumption) were used for imaging. We then used these analytical representations of the image moveout to establish a semblance analysis framework to search for the optimal anisotropic parameters. We have also discussed different parameterizations of the factorized medium to find the one that gave the best accuracy in anisotropy parameters estimation.