Frequency-domain full waveform inversion with a scattering-integral approach and its sensitivity analysis

Abstract

A practical strategy to implement frequency-domain full waveform inversion (FWI) with a scattering-integral approach is presented in this paper. A typical implementation of FWI is the adjoint-state approach, where the data residual at receiver locations are back-propagated into the media to form the gradient. With the scattering-integral (SI) approach, the gradient is formed with a data-weighted Fréchet kernel, which involves calculation of Green's functions for all source and receiver locations. The computational cost and memory requirement of this approach are comparable to the adjoint-state approach using a shot-profile implementation in the frequency-domain. SI implementation can be more efficient if the number of sources is larger than the number of receivers. Sensitivity analysis can also be easily applied without additional cost because the Fréchet kernel has been calculated and stored during the gradient calculation process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach with synthetic data. © 2013 Sinopec Geophysical Research Institute.