Elastic reflection-based waveform inversion with a nonlinear approach

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a highly nonlinear problem due to the complex reflectivity of the earth, and this nonlinearity only increases under the more expensive elastic assumption. In elastic media, we need a good initial P-wave velocity and even better initial S-wave velocity models with accurate representation of the low model wavenumbers for FWI to converge. However, inverting for the low-wavenumber components of P- and S-wave velocities using reflection waveform inversion (RWI) with an objective to fit the reflection shape, rather than produce reflections, may mitigate the limitations of FWI. Because FWI, performing as a migration operator, is preferred of the high-wavenumber updates along reflectors. We have developed an elastic RWI that inverts for the low-wavenumber and perturbation components of the P- and S-wave velocities. To generate the full elastic reflection wavefields, we derive an equivalent stress source made up by the inverted model perturbations and incident wavefields. We update the perturbation and propagation parts of the velocity models in a nested fashion. Applications on the synthetic isotropic models and field data indicate that our method can efficiently update the low- and high-wavenumber parts of the models.