Full-waveform inversion, Part 1: Forward modeling

Abstract

Since its reintroduction by Pratt (1999), full-waveform inversion (FWI) has gained a lot of attention in geophysical exploration because of its ability to build high-resolution velocity models more or less automatically in areas of complex geology. While there is an extensive and growing literature on the topic, publications focus mostly on technical aspects, making this topic inaccessible for a broader audience due to the lack of simple introductory resources for newcomers to computational geophysics. We will accomplish this by providing a hands-on walkthrough of FWI using Devito (Lange et al., 2016), a system based on domain-specific languages that automatically generates code for time-domain finite differences.