Well Constraints in Full Waveform Inversion and its Application in Time-lapse Seismic

Abstract

Full waveform inversion (FWI) has become an integral part of the velocity model building flow due to its resolution, especially in the shallow regimes. Most of the times the wide angle acquisition is not available because of its expense and we still would like to use the power of FWI by utilizing the vintage data. In these older prospects since there is a lot more geological information available besides just seismic data, we can use information from wells for example, to constrain the FWI iterations. Even though well information is at our disposal it is difficult to incorporate it into the traditional FWI which is represented by data misfit objective function. We incorporate wells in the model is to build an apriori model from them and take this into account in the objective function. The objective function can be extended by a model misfit term alongside the data misfit one. We demonstrate how the new objective function works on real data. Furthermore we introduce two workflows to recover model difference between the base-line and the monitor or monitor surveys by FWI in the time-lapse seismic world.