High-Resolution Land FWI with Compressive Sensing Acquisition in the Sultanate of Oman

Summary Land Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) holds great potential as confirmed by recent results (Farooqui et al., 2021, and Guo et al., 2025); however, acquiring high-quality data is crucial for optimal outcomes, particularly in areas with complex near-surface geology. The performance of land FWI can be significantly enhanced using nodal acquisitions that incorporate continuous recordings, longer offsets, and denser sampling, even when decimated or blended. The creation of passive data via interferometry from continuous recordings enables very low-frequency FWI updates, which reduces the risk of cycle skipping at higher frequencies. Furthermore, the use of very long offsets in FWI ensures that the updates are exhaustive, capturing crucial structures and faults, and make high-frequency FWI robust. Using a 2023 3D land survey conducted in the north-eastern part of the Sultanate of Oman, we demonstrate how land FWI can leverage this recent acquisition to deliver superior FWI imaging results compared to those of Pre-Stack Depth Migration (PreSDM), particularly in the most structurally complex area beneath the sand dunes.