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Simultaneous elastic parameter inversion in 2-D/3-D TTI medium combined later arrival times

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Abstract

Traditional traveltime inversion for anisotropic medium is, in general, based on a “weak” assumption in the anisotropic property, which simplifies both the forward part (ray tracing is performed once only) and the inversion part (a linear inversion solver is possible). But for some real applications, a general (both “weak” and “strong”) anisotropic medium should be considered. In such cases, one has to develop a ray tracing algorithm to handle with the general (including “strong”) anisotropic medium and also to design a non-linear inversion solver for later tomography. Meanwhile, it is constructive to investigate how much the tomographic resolution can be improved by introducing the later arrivals. For this motivation, we incorporated our newly developed ray tracing algorithm (multistage irregular shortest-path method) for general anisotropic media with a non-linear inversion solver (a damped minimum norm, constrained least squares problem with a conjugate gradient approach) to formulate a non-linear inversion solver for anisotropic medium. This anisotropic traveltime inversion procedure is able to combine the later (reflected) arrival times. Both 2-D/3-D synthetic inversion experiments and comparison tests show that (1) the proposed anisotropic traveltime inversion scheme is able to recover the high contrast anomalies and (2) it is possible to improve the tomographic resolution by introducing the later (reflected) arrivals, but not as expected in the isotropic medium, because the different velocity (qP, qSV and qSH) sensitivities (or derivatives) respective to the different elastic parameters are not the same but are also dependent on the inclination angle.

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Acknowledgments

This research work was partially supported by China National Major Science and Technology Project (subproject no: 2011ZX05024-001-03), the Doctoral Programming Research Fund of Higher Education, Chinese Ministry of Education (Project No: 20110205110010), and the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, project no: 41504038).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geophysics, College of Geology Engineering and Geomatics, Chang’an University, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Chao-ying Bai, Tao Wang, Shang-bei Yang & Xing-wang Li

  2. Institute of Computing Geophysics, Chang’an University, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Chao-ying Bai

  3. Shaanxi railway Institute, Weinan, 714000, China

    Tao Wang

  4. Department of Geology Science and Engineering, School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210098, China

    Guo-jiao Huang

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  1. Chao-ying Bai
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  2. Tao Wang
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  3. Shang-bei Yang
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  4. Xing-wang Li
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  5. Guo-jiao Huang
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Correspondence to Chao-ying Bai.

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Bai, Cy., Wang, T., Yang, Sb. et al. Simultaneous elastic parameter inversion in 2-D/3-D TTI medium combined later arrival times. J Seismol 20, 475–494 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-015-9539-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-015-9539-3

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