Near-surface velocity estimation by weighted early-arrival waveform inversion

Near-surface velocity estimation by weighted early-arrival waveform inversion

Xukai Shen

Abstract:

In this paper, I present a modified version of the conventional waveform inversion objective function to bridge the gap between the acoustic waveform inversion engine and the more complicated physics in recorded data. The proposed method weighs the amplitude of observed and modeled data. In this way, I use more of the phase information rather than the amplitude information in recorded data. Since phase information is more robust in the presence of visco-acoustic or even elastic related physics. Synthetic examples with inversion of visco-acoustic data and elastic data show that using the proposed objective function can recover detailed velocity structures even with the presence of non-acoustic physics, while conventional waveform inversion tends to fail.