Wave Equation Tomography Using the Unwrapped Phase - Analysis of the Traveltime Sensitivity Kernels

Full waveform inversion suffers from the high non-linearity in the misfit function, which causes the convergence to a local minimum. In the other hand, traveltime tomography has a quasi-linear misfit function but yields low- resolution models. Wave equation tomography (WET) tries to improve on traveltime tomography, by better adhering to the requirements of our finite-frequency data. However, conventional (WET), based on the crosscorelaion lag, yields the popular hallow banana sensitivity kernel indicating that the measured wavefield at a point is insensitive to perturbations along the ray theoretical path at certain finite frequencies. Using the instantaneous traveltime, the sensitivity kernel reflects more the model-data dependency we grown accustom to in seismic inversion (even phase inversion). Demonstrations on synthetic and the Mamousi model support such assertions.