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Extracting Low-Frequency Information from Time Attenuation in Elastic Waveform Inversion

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Abstract

Low-frequency information is crucial for recovering background velocity, but the lack of low-frequency information in field data makes inversion impractical without accurate initial models. Laplace–Fourier domain waveform inversion can recover a smooth model from real data without low-frequency information, which can be used for subsequent inversion as an ideal starting model. In general, it also starts with low frequencies and includes higher frequencies at later inversion stages, while the difference is that its ultralow frequency information comes from the Laplace–Fourier domain. Meanwhile, a direct implementation of the Laplace-transformed wavefield using frequency domain inversion is also very convenient. However, because broad frequency bands are often used in the pure time domain waveform inversion, it is difficult to extract the wavefields dominated by low frequencies in this case. In this paper, low-frequency components are constructed by introducing time attenuation into the recorded residuals, and the rest of the method is identical to the traditional time domain inversion. Time windowing and frequency filtering are also applied to mitigate the ambiguity of the inverse problem. Therefore, we can start at low frequencies and to move to higher frequencies. The experiment shows that the proposed method can achieve a good inversion result in the presence of a linear initial model and records without low-frequency information.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Köhn. D. and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. This research was supported by Elastic Wave Seismic Imaging Technology Cooperation R & D Project of China National Petroleum Corporation, Major State Research Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFC0601101), the Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41574117 and 41474118), Heilongjiang Province Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar (Grant No. JC2016006), and the Open Project of State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering of Dalian University of Technology (Grant No. LP1509).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources Research, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Xuebao Guo & Hong Liu

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Xuebao Guo & Hong Liu

  3. School of Earth Science, Science and Technology Innovation Team on Fault Deformation, Sealing and Fluid Migration, Northeast Petroleum University, Daqing, 163318, China

    Ying Shi

  4. School of Earth Science, Northeast Petroleum University, Daqing, 163318, China

    Ying Shi & Weihong Wang

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  1. Xuebao Guo
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  2. Hong Liu
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Correspondence to Xuebao Guo.

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Guo, X., Liu, H., Shi, Y. et al. Extracting Low-Frequency Information from Time Attenuation in Elastic Waveform Inversion. Pure Appl. Geophys. 174, 1303–1314 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-016-1462-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-016-1462-1

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