Improved seismic envelope full-waveform inversion

Abstract

The envelope full-waveform-inversion method has the potential to greatly improve the estimation of long-wavelength components of subsurface seismic velocity, and simultaneously avoid or reduce inversion cycle skipping, by fitting the envelopes of observed and modeled seismic waveform data, rather than fitting the waveforms directly. However, some issues such as instability of the adjoint source and gradient term make it challenging to use in practice for many seismology applications. We examine the envelope inversion (EI) methods with different envelope function exponent p values from an adjoint source analysis perspective and reveal the adverse effects of the adjoint source weighting term on the data residuals, which degrade or mute important inversion gradient contributions, especially from reflected or scattered phases in the seismic data. We develop the theory and implementation for an improved EI (IEI) method by adding an upshift constant (zero-frequency direct current [DC] bias term) to the seismic waveform data before calculating the envelope functions, which can help solve the instability issue of the adjoint source of the EI with power value p = 1. Our approach is different than the common but simple addition of a “water-level” damping constant in the denominator of the data residual-weighting term, which can ignore important information contained in the data residuals. Our IEI method becomes a mixed envelope-waveform objective function, which introduces a new adjoint source weighting term that can preserve all of the information contained in the data residuals, by boosting the low-amplitude phases of the seismic waveform, while simultaneously preserving the correct envelope (energy shape) of the high-amplitude phases. We test the performance of all three methods in detail using the highly realistic SEAM4D model and data and find the advantages of our new IEI method compared with conventional EI and full-waveform inversion methods.