Visco-acoustic full waveform inversion: From a DG forward solver to a Newton-CG inverse solver

Abstract

Full waveform inversion (FWI) entails the ill-posed reconstruction of material parameters (such as sound speed and attenuation) from measurements of complete wave fields (full seismograms). In this paper we present a novel framework for FWI in the visco-acoustic regime. The new framework is based on a new elegant derivation of the system of state and adjoint PDEs which are approximated by the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method. The inverse problem is then solved by the well established regularization scheme CG-REGINN which has not yet been applied in the context of FWI. For the DG discretization we provide a preconditioner for the efficient computation of the time steps by GMRES which yields optimal convergence estimates in space and time and which is confirmed by numerical tests. The inverse solver expresses the required Fréchet derivative and its adjoint in the DG setting. Successful reconstructions in a simplified cross-well setting serve as a proof of concept for our framework and demonstrate the applicability of our new combination of DG method and inverse solver. Some of the inversion experiments use seismograms generated by an independent finite difference time domain forward solver to avoid inverse crime.