Summary Reflection Waveform Inversion (RWI) is a technique that uses pure reflection data to estimate subsurface background velocity, relying on evolving seismic images. Conventional RWI operates in a cyclic workflow, with two key components in each cycle—migration and reflection tomography. Conventional RWI may result in suboptimal background velocity estimation, partly due to limited or unresolved resolution within each component in each cycle. While gradient preconditioning with the reciprocal of Hessian information helps resolve this issue in both components of RWI, it becomes impractical for a large number of model parameters. One-way reflection waveform inversion (ORWI) is a reflection waveform inversion technique in which the forward modeling scheme operates in one direction (downward and then upward) via virtual parallel depth levels within the medium. Leveraging the ORWI framework, we decompose and reduce the linear Hessian operator (also known as the approximate Hessian or Gauss-Newton Hessian) into multiple smaller sub-operators. In particular, the diagonal blocks of the mono-frequency approximate Hessian operators, each corresponding to a single depth level within the medium, are extracted and inverted to precondition the corresponding mono-frequency gradients in both the migration and reflection tomography components of ORWI. This depth-dependent gradient preconditioning transforms standard ORWI into a high-resolution, yet computationally feasible version aimed at addressing suboptimal velocity estimation, referred to as high-resolution ORWI (HR-ORWI). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through successful applications to synthetic data examples.
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