Innovative Inversion Schemes for Model Building and Reflectivity Estimation: A Deep Water West African Case Study

Late Cretaceous channel systems create structural uncertainty and impact amplitude fidelity of both Late and Early Cretaceous plays in deep water Côte d'Ivoire seismic data. We present a case study using a combination of Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) and image domain Least-squares migration (LSM) to resolve the impact of complex Late Cretaceous channel systems on deeper targets. A full wavefield FWI approach using a velocity kernel that eliminates the reflectivity imprint, created an accurate velocity model. This removed the structural uncertainty when used in the imaging step. A reflectivity estimate was then determined using LSM. The final dataset had improved amplitude fidelity by compensating for the loss of bandwidth and illumination associated with the Late Cretaceous channels.