Full-waveform inversion of plane-wave seismograms in stratified acoustic media; theory and feasibility

Abstract

Abstract We have implemented an inversion procedure for obtaining velocity and density profiles from multioffset data in a layered acoustic medium. Using an iterative modeling technique and the p-tau representation, the procedure is derived from the nonlinear least-squares formalism of Tarantola and Valette. The feasibility of this method depends upon obtaining Frechet derivatives during the modeling process and on vectorizing the Thompson-Haskell reflectivity algorithm. Test data sets for this study are gathers of two to four plane-wave synthetic seismograms which may contain both precritical and postcritical arrivals generated by a seismic wavelet. These examples demonstrate convergence to the correct velocity and density profiles with reasonable accuracy.