Salt Structure Elastic Full Waveform Inversion Based on the Multiscale Signed Envelope

Abstract

Building high-fidelity velocity models for salt structures is a valuable and difficult problem in seismic exploration. Acoustic-based full-waveform inversion (FWI) methods usually produce velocity artifacts around high-contrast interfaces due to the generation of converted waves. Therefore, elastic FWI (EFWI) should be used in salt model velocity building. Two problems that restrict EFWI are: lack of low-frequency seismic data and multiparameter coupling. For the first problem, envelope is a good choice because of its ability to reconstruct low-frequency components independent of the frequency range of seismic data. However, envelope is instantaneous energy flow and lacks polarity information, while the elastic waves are vectors. Thus, the direct use of envelope to reconstruct the low-frequency components of elastic waves causes serious artificial artifacts in envelope inversion. Therefore, we introduce signed demodulation and window average function to obtain the multiscale (MS) envelope with polarity, defined as the MS signed envelope to reconstruct low-frequency elastic data. The reconstructed low-frequency data are then used in EFWI, and an elastic MS signed direct envelope inversion algorithm is proposed. For the second problem, wave mode decomposition and hierarchical inversion strategies are integrated into the inversion to eliminate the multiparameter coupling effect. A salt layer model and BP model are used to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm. Finally, the deficiencies in the research of this article and further improvement plans are also discussed.