Time domain viscoelastic full waveform inversion

Viscous attenuation can have a strong impact on seismic wave propagation, but it is rarely taken into account in full waveform inversion (FWI). When viscoelasticity is considered in time domain FWI, the displacement formulation of the wave equation is usually used instead of the popular velocity-stress formulation. However, inversion schemes rely on the adjoint equations, which are quite different for the velocity-stress formulation than for the displacement formulation. In this paper, we apply the adjoint state method to the isotropic viscoelasticwave equation in the velocity-stress formulation based on the generalized standard linear solid rheology. By applying linear transformations to the wave equation before deriving the adjoint state equations, we obtain two symmetric sets of partial differential equations for the forward and adjoint variables. The resulting sets of equations only differ by a sign change and can be solved by the same numerical implementation. We also investigate the crosstalk between parameter classes (velocity and attenuation) of the viscoelastic equation. More specifically, we show that the attenuation levels can be used to recover the quality factors of P and S waves, but that they are very sensitive to velocity errors. Finally, we present a synthetic example of viscoelastic FWI in the context of monitoring CO2 geological sequestration. We show that FWI based on our formulation can indeed recover P-and S-wave velocities and their attenuation levels when attenuation is high enough. Both changes in velocity and attenuation levels recovered with FWI can be used to track the CO2 plume during and after injection. Further studies are required to evaluate the performance of viscoelastic FWI on real data.