Physics-Guided Data-Driven Seismic Inversion: Recent progress and future opportunities in full-waveform inversion

Abstract

The goal of seismic inversion is to obtain subsurface properties from surface measurements. Seismic images have proven valuable, even crucial, for a variety of applications, including subsurface energy exploration, earthquake early warning, carbon capture and sequestration, estimating pathways of subsurface contaminant transport, etc. These subsurface properties (such as wave speed, density, and elastic velocities) influence the transmission of seismic waves through the subsurface media, and well-understood physics models (so-called 'forward models') can be used to predict what surface measurements would be made for any given subsurface configuration.