A good test case for inversion

The Madagascar satellite data is an excellent test case for seismic inversion methods because it poses several challenges that occur regularly in making seismic maps. This data was recorded on thin, curved swaths creating complications similar to the irregular geometry commonly seen in 3D seismic acquisition. This could be cable feathering on marine data or irregular land geometries cause by obstructions. As will be shown in more detail later, the fact that there are both ascending and descending tracks presents a problem of combining two different types of data to image one geological event. Furthermore, this data has two data densities, the northern sparsely sampled region and the southern densely sampled region. Balancing the weighting of these two data densities adds complexity to the inversion fitting goals. Additionally, the sparsely sampled region poses a challenging missing data problem especially because the sparse tracks are not oriented parallel to any axis. Lastly, the Madagascar data makes a good test case because of the clarity of the image itself. If the data is processed incorrectly, it is usually obvious that a mistake was made. However, as we will see later, this is not always the case.