On the Contribution of Head Waves to Full Waveform Inversion

Full waveform inversion suffers from local minima, due to a lack of low frequencies in the data. A reflector below the zone of interest may, however, help in recovering the long-wavelength components of a velocity perturbation, as demonstrated in a paper by Mora. With the Born approximation for the perturbation in a reference model consisting of...

Surface wave inversion for a p-wave velocity profile: Estimation of the squared slowness gradient

Surface waves can be used to obtain a near-surface shear wave profile. The inverse problem is usually solved for the locally 1-D problem of a set of homogeneous horizontal elastic layers. The output is a set of shear velocity values for each layer in the profile. P-wave velocity profile can be estimated if higher modes and P-guided waves are...

Estimation of the p-wave velocity profile of elastic real data based on surface wave inversion

Recently, we proposed an analytical approach to invert for a smoothly varying near-surface P-wave velocity profile that has a squared slowness linearly decreasing with depth. The exact solution for such a velocity profile in the acoustic approximation can be expressed in terms of Airy functions and leads to a dispersion equation. The method was...

Estimating a continuous p-wave velocity profile with constant squared-slowness gradient models from seismic field data

We inverted seismic field data for a continuous, laterally invariant P-wave velocity profile. Instead of the usual approach that involves horizontal layers with piecewise constant densities and velocities, we consider models of one or two layers with a constant gradient of the squared slowness above a homogeneous halfspace. With a single layer...

Surface-wave inversion for a P-velocity profile with a constant depth gradient of the squared slowness

Surface waves are often used to estimate a near-surface shear-velocity profile. The inverse problem is solved for the locally one-dimensional problem of a set of homogeneous horizontal elastic layers. The result is a set of shear velocities, one for each layer. To obtain a P-wave velocity profile, the P-guided waves should be included in the...