Full-waveform inversion by model extension: Practical applications

ABSTRACT Producing reliable acoustic subsurface velocity models still remains the main bottleneck of the oil and gas industry’s traditional imaging sequence. In complex geologic settings, the output of conventional ray-based or wave-equation-based tomographic methods may not be sufficiently accurate for full-waveform inversion (FWI) to converge to a geologically satisfactory earth model. We create a new method referred to as full-waveform inversion by model extension (FWIME) in which a wave-equation migration velocity analysis (WEMVA) technique is efficiently paired with a modified version of FWI. We find that our method is more powerful than applying WEMVA and FWI sequentially, and that it can converge to accurate solutions without the use of a good initial guess or low-frequency energy. We determine FWIME’s potential on five realistic and challenging numerical examples that simulate complex geologic scenarios often encountered in hydrocarbon exploration. We guide the reader step by step throughout the optimization process. We find that our method can simultaneously invert all wave types with the same simple mechanism and without the need for a user-intensive hyperparameter tuning process. In an open-source online repository, we provide our C++/compute unified device architecture (CUDA) numerical implementation accelerated with graphics processing units, encapsulated in a Python interface. All the numerical examples developed are accessible through Python notebooks and fully reproducible.