Q Estimation Through Waveform Inversion

This paper presents an approach to estimate the quality factor Q through waveform inversion. In a viscoacoustic medium consisting of one standard linear solid, stress and strain relaxation times govern the dissipation mechanism. Their difference, normalized to be a unitless variable τ, determines the magnitude of Q. In this paper we iteratively optimize a τ model by minimizing an objective function that measures the residuals between recorded and synthetic seismic data. The τ model is then converted to its corresponding Q model. A viscoacoustic Marmousi model demonstrates the accuracy of the approach. For a field data from the Gulf of Mexico we present a workflow to estimate its Q model and then optimize its velocity model through waveform inversions with the attenuation compensation. The workflow shows some promise to get the final seismic products with the attenuation compensation for physical materials.