2D Elastic Full Waveform Tomography of Synthetic Marine Reflection Seismic Data

With the increasing performance of parallel supercomputers full waveform tomography (FWT) approaches can reduce the misfit between recorded and modelled data, to deduce a very detailed physical model of the underground. In recent years acoustic waveform tomography became a very popular tool to image the underground structures. However, acoustic waveform inversion has the disadvantage, that only P waves can be inverted. It can not invert for S-waves or surface waves. Here we will present the first inversion results of our elastic parallel time domain FWT code for two synthetic model examples and discuss problems which occurred during the code development like the choice of model parameters. Even though the problem is highly nonlinear and ill conditioned the elastic FWT is able to resolve very detailed images of all three elastic model parameters.