Multiparameter estimation with acoustic vertical transverse isotropic full-waveform inversion of surface seismic data

Abstract

Obtaining accurate depth-migrated images demands an anisotropic representation of the earth. As a prominent tool for building high-resolution earth models, full-waveform inversion (FWI) therefore must not only account for anisotropy during wavefield simulation but also reconstruct the anisotropy fields. We have developed an inversion strategy to perform acoustic multiparameter FWI of surface seismic data in transversely isotropic media with a vertical axis of symmetry (VTI). During the early era of FWI practice, most studies only invert for the most dominant parameter, that is, the vertical velocity, and the rest of the model parameters are either ignored or kept constant. Recently, more and more emphases focus on inverting for more parameters, such as for the vertical velocity and the anisotropy fields; these are referred to as multiparameter inversion. Due to the dominant influence of the vertical velocity on the kinematics of surface seismic data, we have developed a hierarchical approach to invert for the vertical velocity first, but we kept the anisotropy fields unchanged and only switched to joint inversion of the vertical velocity and the anisotropy fields when the inversion for the vertical velocity approaches convergence. In addition, we have illustrated the necessity of incorporating the diving and reflection energy during inversion to mitigate the nonuniqueness of the solutions caused by the coupling between the vertical velocity and the anisotropy fields. We also demonstrate the success of our method for VTI FWI using synthetic and real data examples based on marine surface seismic acquisition. Our results show that incorporation of multiparameter anisotropy inversion produced better focused migration images.