f Challenges and Value of Applying FWI to Depth Imaging Projects

l Waveform Inversion (FWI) has now been established a few decades ago (Lailly 1983; Tarantola 1984; Pratt et al. 1996). Until recently however, the application of the technique on full scale 3D seismic was made impossible due to the computational requirements of modeling thousands of shot. Recent advances in high performance computers along with the development of efficient 3D modeling algorithms has lead to the first successfull full scale application on field data (Plessix et al. 2009, Sirgue et al. 2009, Vigh and Star 2009). However, the added value of performing FWI to Prestack Depth Imaging Projects is yet to be clearly defined by the industry. This task is particularly challenging since the type of seismic acquisition largely varies from one asset to the other; along with the geophysical environment (presence of salt, water depth etc…). In this workshop, we will present a wide range of application of FWI to streamer data in both deep offshore and shallow water environments. We will show that FWI may be applied to a wide range of seismic data: from an isotropic application in the Caspian Sea to more complex application such as deep offshore of Gulf of Guinea.