J. Liu
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11 records found
1
Seismic incoherent noise and waves scattered from objects in the crossline directions can cause 2D elastic full-waveform inversion (FWI) to produce artifacts in the resulting 2D models. We develop a complete workflow that can determine subsurface S-wave velocity (VS) models inverted from 2D near-surface seismic data more stably. We make use of a combination of supervirtual interferometry and a matched filter to accurately retrieve dominant surface waves from the field data, whereas the incoherent noise and 3D scattering events are significantly suppressed. The subsurface structures obtained from inverting the retrieved data can be interpreted together with the sections resulting from FWI of the original data to mitigate the potential misinterpretation of artifacts. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to invert 2D near-surface seismic data even when the data quality is lowered by the presence of strong noise and 3D scattered events caused by objects located in the crossline direction.
Traditional least-squares full-waveform inversion (FWI) suffers from severe local minima problems in case of the presence of strongly dispersive surface waves. Additionally, recorded wavefields are often characterized by amplitude errors due to varying source coupling and incorrect 3D-to-2D geometrical-spreading correction. Thus, least-squares FWI is considered less than suitable for near-surface applications. In this paper, we introduce an amplitude-unbiased coherency measure as a misfit function that can be incorporated into FWI. Such coherency was earlier used in phase-weighted stacking (PWS) to enhance weak but coherent signals. The benefit of this amplitude-unbiased misfit function is that it can extract information uniformly for all seismic signals (surface waves, reflections, and scattered waves). Using the adjoint-state method, we show how to calculate the gradient of this new misfit function. We validate the robustness of the new approach using checkerboard tests and synthetic data contaminated by random noise. We then apply the new FWI approach to a field dataset acquired at an archaeological site located in Ostia, Italy. The goal of this survey was to map the unexcavated archaeological remains with high-resolution. We identify a known tumulus in the FWI results. The instantaneous-phase coherency FWI results also establish that the shallow subsurface under the survey lines is quite heterogeneous. The instantaneous-phase coherency FWI of near-surface data can be a promising tool to image shallow small-scale objects buried under shallow soil covers, as found at archaeological sites.
High-resolution reflection seismics is a powerful tool that can provide the required resolution for subsurface imaging and monitoring in urban settings. Shallow seismic reflection data acquired in soil-covered sites are often contaminated by source-coherent surface waves and other linear moveout noises (LMON) that might be caused by, e.g., anthropogenic sources or harmonic distortion in vibroseis data. In the case of shear-wave seismic reflection data, such noises are particularly problematic as they overlap the useful shallow reflections. We have developed new schemes for suppressing such surface-wave noise and LMON while still preserving shallow reflections, which are of great interest to high-resolution near-surface imaging. We do this by making use of two techniques. First, we make use of seismic interferometry to retrieve predominantly source-coherent surface waves and LMON. We then adaptively subtract these dominant source-coherent surface waves and LMON from the seismic data in a separate step. We illustrate our proposed method using synthetic and field data. We compare results from our method with results from frequency–wave-number (f-k) filtering. Using synthetic data, we show that our schemes are robust in separating shallow reflections from source-coherent surface waves and LMON even when they share very similar velocity and frequency contents, whereas f-k filtering might cause undesirable artefacts. Using a field shear-wave reflection dataset characterised by overwhelming LMON, we show that the reflectors at a very shallow depth can be imaged because of significant suppression of the LMON due to the application of the scheme that we have developed.
The Green's function between two receivers can be retrieved using seismic interferometry (SI) by cross-correlation, as if one of the receivers were a virtual seismic source. When the wavefields experience intrinsic losses during propagation, non-physical arrivals (ghosts) would appear in the retrieved result. These ghosts are a result of internal reflections inside the different layers lying between the subsurface sources and the receivers. Recent studies have introduced a stable method to monitor the layer-specific changes in quality factor (Q) using the ghosts retrieved by SI applied to a horizontal-well data. However, drilling a horizontal well is much more complicated and expensive than drilling a conventional vertical well. Because of this, we show here how the Q-estimation method introduced for the horizontal well can be adapted to monitor layer-specific changes of Q using a vertical well. In order to improve the accuracy of the Q-estimation, we propose a grid-searching method to detect the optimal effective Q. We illustrate our method using numerically modelling data from a horizontal and a vertical well.