A reflection-based efficient wavefield inversion

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is popularly used to obtain a high-resolution subsurface velocity model. However, it requires ei-ther a good initial velocity model or low-frequency data to mitigate the cycle-skipping issue. Reflection-waveform inversion (RWI) uses a migration/demigration process to retrieve a background model that can be used as a good initial velocity in FWI. The draw-back of conventional RWI is that it requires the use of least-squares migration, which is often computationally expensive, and it is still prone to cycle skipping at far offsets. To improve the computational efficiency and overcome cycle skipping in the original RWI, we have incorporated it into a recently introduced method called effi-cient wavefield inversion (EWI) by inverting for the Born-scattered wavefield instead of the wavefield itself. In this case, we use perturbation-related secondary sources in the modified source function. Unlike conventional RWI, the perturbations are calcu-lated naturally as part of the calculation of the scattered wavefield in an efficient way. Because the sources in the reflection-based EWI (REWI) are located in the subsurface, we are able to update the background model along the reflection wavepath. In the back-ground velocity inversion, we calculate the background perturba-tion by a deconvolution process at each frequency. After obtaining the REWI inverted velocity model, a sequential FWI or EWI is needed to obtain a high-resolution model. We determine the val-idity of our approach using synthetic data generated from a section of the Sigsbee2A model. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we test it on an ocean-bottom cable data set from the North Sea. We find that our methodology leads to improved velocity models as evidenced by flatter angle gathers.

Automated summary

Full waveform inversion (FWI) is commonly used for high-resolution subsurface velocity modeling but requires a good initial model or low-frequency data to address cycle skipping. Reflection waveform inversion (RWI) uses migration/demigration to obtain a reliable initial velocity model, however, it is computationally expensive and prone to cycle skipping. Efficient Wavefield Inversion (EWI) improves computational efficiency and mitigates cycle skipping by inverting the Born-scattered wavefield instead of the full wavefield.