Two-grid full-waveform Rayleigh-wave inversion via a genetic algorithm — Part 1: Method and synthetic examples

Abstract

When reliable a priori information is not available, it is difficult to correctly predict near-surface S-wave velocity models from Rayleigh waves through existing techniques, especially in the case of complex geology. To tackle this issue, we have developed a new method: two-grid genetic-algorithm Rayleigh-wave full-waveform inversion (FWI). Adopting a two-grid parameterization of the model, the genetic algorithm inverts for unknown velocities and densities at the nodes of a coarse grid, whereas the forward modeling is performed on a fine grid to avoid numerical dispersion. A bilinear interpolation brings the coarse-grid results into the fine-grid models. The coarse inversion grid allows for a significant reduction in the computing time required by the genetic algorithm to converge. With a coarser grid, there are fewer unknowns and less required computing time, at the expense of the model resolution. To further increase efficiency, our inversion code can perform the optimization using an offset-marching strategy and/or a frequency-marching strategy that can make use of different kinds of objective functions and allows for parallel computing. We illustrate the effect of our inversion method using three synthetic examples with rather complex near-surface models. Although no a priori information was used in all three tests, the long-wavelength structures of the reference models were fairly predicted, and satisfactory matches between “observed” and predicted data were achieved. The fair predictions of the reference models suggest that the final models estimated by our genetic-algorithm FWI, which we call macromodels, would be suitable inputs to gradient-based Rayleigh-wave FWI for further refinement. We also explored other issues related to the practical use of the method in different work and explored applications of the method to field data.