Reflection Full Waveform Inversion with Decoupled Elastic-wave Equations in Inhomogeneous Medium

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Zhanyuan Liang
Guochen Wu
Xiaoyu Zhang
Qingyang Li

Abstract

Reflection full-waveform inversion (RFWI) can reduce the nonlinearity of inversion providing an accurate initial velocity model for full-waveform inversion (FWI) through the tomographic components (low-wavenumber). However, elastic-wave reflection full-waveform inversion (ERFWI) is more vulnerable to the problem of local minimum due to the complicated multi-component wavefield. Our algorithm first divides kernels of ERFWI into four subkernels based on the theory of decoupled elastic-wave equations. Then we try to construct the tomographic components of ERFWI with only single-component wavefields, similarly to acoustic inversions. However, the S-wave velocity is still vulnerable to the coupling effects because of P-wave components contained in the S-wavefield in an inhomogeneous medium. Therefore we develop a method for decoupling elastic- wave equations in an inhomogeneous medium, which is applied to the decomposition of kernels in ERFWI. The new decoupled system can improve the accuracy of S-wavefield and hence further reduces the high-wavenumber crosstalk in the subkernel of S-wave velocity after kernels are decomposed. The numerical examples of Sigsbee2A model demonstrate that our ERFWI method with decoupled elastic-wave equations can efficiently recover the low-wavenumber components of the model and improve the precision of the S-wave velocity.

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How to Cite
Liang, Z., Wu, G., Zhang, X. and Li, Q. (2021) “Reflection Full Waveform Inversion with Decoupled Elastic-wave Equations in Inhomogeneous Medium”, Annals of Geophysics, 64(1), p. SE110. doi: 10.4401/ag-8363.
Section
Seismology