Borrowing insight from travel-time reflection tomography to solve the depth reflectivity-velocity coupling issue of RFWI.

The reflectivity-velocity coupling is one of the major reason of the slow convergence of the conventional Reflection Full Waveform Inversion (RFWI) approach. In this communication, we start by reviewing the travel-time reflection tomography (RT) and the different ways of accounting for the depth-velocity coupling. Then, we draw the connection between the inverse problem of the RFWI approach and the inverse problem of RT. From this analogy, we see that the conventional RFWI does not fully account for the reflectivity-velocity coupling effects. To overcome this issue, we propose to reformulate the conventional RFWI problem into a Reflectivity-Velocity Consistent Waveform Inversion (RVCWI) method. Finally, with a numerical example, we compare the performances of the conventional RFWI and the RVCWI approaches. This numerical experiment confirms us the very slow convergence rate of the conventional RFWI approach and the much faster convergence rate obtained with the RVCWI approach .