Application of Early Arrival Waveform Inversion to Qademah Shallow Land Data

Early arrival waveform inversion (EWI) is utilized to estimate the near surface velocity parameter by minimizing the difference between synthetic and observed data iteratively. We apply this method to a data set collected at land collected with source-receiver offsets no longer than 528. This data set is collected at Qademah western Saudi Arabia with the purpose of characterizing the shallow subsurface. We estimate the near surface velocity distribution by applying multiscale early arrival waveform inversion (MEWI) to shallow seismic land data. The multiscale strategy is employed to overcome the local minima problem and cycle skipping phenomenon. We then apply the workflow on the land dataset and the inverted velocity model is better resolved compared to travel-time tomography. In this paper, we first present the theory of EWI. In the following section, we introduce our seismic survey and data processing steps for the Qademah data. The EWI and traveltime tomography methods are applied to the early arrivals of the two dimensional (2D) land data set, and the resulting tomograms are compared to one another in the numerical results section. The last section summarizes the salient results of our research.