Toward a Practical Appraisal for Waveform Tomography of Band- and Offset-Limited Marine Seismic Data

Abstract

We present a generalized workflow to retrieve high-resolution P-wave velocity ( <formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex>$V_{ P}$</tex> </formula> ) models of complex Earth's subsurface structures from traditional marine near-vertical seismic reflection experiments. These records have typically offsets too short to map refraction phases and lack low-frequency information. The workflow is composed of three steps: 1) downward continuation (DC) of seismic records to the seafloor to recover diving wave information; 2) travel-time tomography (TTT) of first arrivals obtained from DC data, to retrieve a kinematically correct model; and 3) full-waveform inversion (FWI) of the original streamer dataset, starting with the model obtained with TTT and sequentially introducing higher wavenumber details into the model. We show that the TTT allows overcoming the issues associated with the nonlinearity intrinsic to FWI. We also disentangle envelope and phase from the waveform to choose the objective function most suitable for FWI. We assess the accuracy of initial models and predict the quality of the FWI results by quantifying the early arrival cycle skipping between original and simulated data. The efficiency of the workflow is tested with a challenging synthetic target model, containing vertical boundaries with strong velocity contrasts and velocity inversions embedded in a checkerboard-like pattern. We show that workflow steps 1) and 2) provide a TTT model that is not cycle skipped at the frequencies available in most marine seismic experiments and thus allow step 3) FWI to obtain high-resolution <formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex>$V_{ P}$</tex> </formula> models of the subsurface using band- and offset-limited field datasets, traditionally collected in marine airgun and streamer acquisitions.