Early-arrival waveform inversion: Application to cross-well field data

Conclusions

A cross-well dataset was acquired to more accurately identify the boundary of an anomalous zone between the two wells. We applied early-arrival waveform inversion to the dataset. By trying to match recorded first arrivals, waveform inversion produced a much higher-resolution result than did traveltime tomography results. The boundary of the anomalous zone is more sharply defined. Details from the waveform inversion result is verified by the well-log data. Comparison of forward-modeled data with input data also suggests that wave-equation based methods predict data better than ray-based methods.