Seafloor elastic parameters estimation based on AVO inversion

Abstract

Seafloor elastic parameters play an important role in many fields as diverse as marine construction, seabed resources exploration and seafloor acoustics. In order to estimate seafloor elastic parameters, we perform AVO inversion with seafloor reflected seismic data. As a particular reflection interface, the seafloor reflector does not support S-waves and the elastic parameters change dramatically across it. Conventional approximations to the Zoeppritz equations are not applicable for the seafloor situation. In this paper, we perform AVO inversion with the exact Zoeppritz equations through an unconstrained optimization method. Our synthetic study proves that the inversion method does not show strong dependence on the initial model for both unconsolidated and semi-consolidated seabed situations. The inversion uncertainty of the elastic parameters increases with the noise level, and decreases with the incidence angle range. Finally, we perform inversion of data from the South China Sea, and obtain satisfactory results, which are in good agreement with previous research.