Full Waveform Inversion Using a High-Dimensional Local-Coherence Misfit Function

Conventional full-waveform seismic inversion (FWI) tries to estimate a subsurface model that can accurately predict surface records by minimizing an L-2-norm misfit between observed and synthetic data. If the initial model is far away from the true model, the cycle-skipping issue might occur and the L-2-norm-based FWI produces a spurious model. To mitigate this problem, we present a novel FWI scheme using a high-dimensional local coherence misfit function. A 2-D/3-D window is first used to extract local seismic waveform from the common-shot gathers. Then, we apply a normalized cross-correlation to measure the coherence of local synthetic and observed records, which is used as the misfit to iteratively update the subsurface velocity model. The new misfit function enhances the contribution of phase fitting while reducing the amplitude contribution, which helps to increase the tolerance of FWI to an inaccurate initial velocity model. In addition, the computation of local waveform coherence along the temporal and spatial axes can adaptively balance the adjoint source amplitudes for strong near-offset reflections and weak far-offset refractions, which improves the low-wavenumber updates. Numerical experiments for synthetic and field data demonstrate that the proposed FWI scheme has a better tolerance to inaccurate starting models and is less sensitive to cycle-skipping issues compared with the conventional FWI method.

Automated summary

Conventional full-waveform seismic inversion (FWI) tries to estimate a subsurface model by minimizing the L-2-norm misfit between observed and synthetic data. However, it may produce a spurious model if the initial model is far from the true model. To mitigate this problem, a novel FWI scheme using a high-dimensional local coherence misfit function is presented. Numerical experiments show that this scheme has a better tolerance to inaccurate starting models and is less sensitive to cycle-skipping issues compared with the conventional FWI method.