Physics-Guided Data-Driven Seismic Inversion: Recent progress and future opportunities in full-waveform inversion

The goal of seismic inversion is to obtain subsurface properties from surface measurements. Seismic images have proven valuable, even crucial, for a variety of applications, including subsurface energy exploration, earthquake early warning, carbon capture and sequestration, estimating pathways of subsurface contaminant transport, etc. These subsurface properties (such as wave speed, density, and elastic velocities) influence the transmission of seismic waves through the subsurface media, and well-understood physics models (so-called forward models) can be used to predict what surface measurements would be made for any given subsurface configuration.

Automated summary

The goal of seismic inversion is to obtain subsurface properties from surface measurements. Seismic images are crucial for various applications such as subsurface energy exploration, earthquake early warning, and estimating subsurface contaminant transport pathways. These properties influence the transmission of seismic waves, and forward models can predict surface measurements based on known physics.