Rock Physics Constrained Anisotropic Tomography - Methodology and Applications to the Gulf of Mexico

We present a new method for anisotropic velocity model building for seismic imaging. In the paper we describe the method and a case study that uses stochastic rock physics modeling of the non-linear relationships between the anisotropic parameters (epsilon, delta and vertical velocity) to estimate non-stationary covariance functions that are used as a priori information in the tomographic equations. This method allows us to constrain the tomographic updates with rock physics and thus stabilizes tomography. We present the method and a Gulf of Mexico (GoM) case study for anisotropic model building.