Reflection full waveform inversion

Abstract

Because of the combination of optimization algorithms and full wave equations, full-waveform inversion (FWI) has become the frontier of the study of seismic exploration and is gradually becoming one of the essential tools for obtaining the Earth interior information. However, the application of conventional FWI to pure reflection data in the absence of a highly accurate starting velocity model is difficult. Compared to other types of seismic waves, reflections carry the information of the deep part of the subsurface. Reflection FWI, therefore, is able to improve the accuracy of imaging the Earth interior further. Here, we demonstrate a means of achieving this successfully by interleaving least-squares RTM with a version of reflection FWI in which the tomographic gradient that is required to update the background macro-model is separated from the reflectivity gradient using the Born approximation during forward modeling. This provides a good update to the macro-model. This approach is then followed by conventional FWI to obtain a final high-fidelity high-resolution result from a poor starting model using only reflection data. Further analysis reveals the high-resolution result is achieved due to a deconvolution imaging condition implicitly used by FWI.