2D Acoustic Full Waveform Tomography of Marine Streamer Data – Data Preparation and Choice of Inversion Strategies

In recent years, many synthetic studies have shown the great resolution potential of full waveform tomography. Nevertheless, application to field data is not a common standard yet. This study discusses some of the problems related to the inversion of conventional single sensor marine streamer data in the 2D acoustic approximation. To reconstruct realistic velocity models from the field data additional effort is required to overcome the problem of the local minima and to improve the convergence of the waveform inversion. This mainly concerns the field data preprocessing and the choice of adequate inversion strategies. For a marine field data set we experienced that the application of a 3D-2D correction, a data denoising algorithm, and amplitude corrections are essential preprocessing steps. Furthermore, we investigate synthetic case studies which mimic real acquisition geometries and source signals to evaluate the benefits of different preconditioning approaches and model assumptions.