First Arrival Traveltime Tomography - When Simpler Is Better

Classical algorithms used for first arrival traveltime tomography are not necessarily well suited for handling very large seismic dataset or for taking advantage of current supercomputers. The classical approach of first arrival traveltime tomography is revisited with the proposal of a simpler mathematical formulation that avoids the memory storage of the Fréchet derivative matrix. The algorithm proposed in this work represents a very effective industrial solution for first arrival traveltime tomography allowing to process huge and dense land surveys with no compromise in terms of amount of data and model description.