Enhanced tomography resolution by a fat ray technique

Abstract

We propose a tomography algorithm to enhance the resolution of 3D velocity model building. Our algorithm uses a fat ray instead of the conventional asymptotic ray. Compared to conventional ray tomography, the resulting tomography matrix is far less sparse. Thus, while the new matrix may still be ill‐conditioned, much less model regularization is required to produce a well‐posed system. In turn this should lead to a higher resolution tomographic update. A subsalt velocity analysis test on the Sigsbee 2a model shows promising result; we also apply the fat ray technique to well‐tie tomography that estimates anisotropy parameters.