Full Waveform Inversion With Blended Seismic Data

Full waveform inversion has the potential of playing the central role in seismic imaging in the near future. In fact, its power of providing higher seismic resolution compared to pre-stack depth migration may contribute to seismic interpretation in areas which present highly complex geology. However, for complex geological models the success of seismic imaging depends on the design of the seismic experiment. In fact, besides the necessity of a broad band of frequencies, it is required to properly record the<br>scattering wavefields associated with geological targets. Otherwise, the imaging and inversion schemes shall not be effective. Acquiring the scattering wavefields as a 3D field may be unfeasible by using conventional schemes, where consecutive shot records don’t have record time superposition. In this work, we abandon this condition, and extend the inversion scheme called Contrast Source Inversion (CSI) to handle data in which shots are superposed randomly (Blended data). On the proposed method, the deblending phase (separation of the interference between shots) is not necessary. Numerical results applied on Marmousi model show how efficient, accurate and stable this method is when compared to results obtained with traditional acquisition approaches. Even in very low signal to noise ratio cases, except for small artifacts, it was possible to recover all features present in the original model.