A practical guide of the 2D acoustic full waveform inversion on synthetic land seismic data

Abstract

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been successfully applied in seismic hydrocarbon exploration as it results in the highest resolution inverted velocity and density models. However, the application of FWI on land datasets is a much more challenging process than its application on marine datasets. This paper suggests a step-by-step guide for the 2D acoustic FWI on a synthetic dataset, in particular, in which we used the SEAM Phase II-Foothills dataset that exhibits many of the characteristics of real land data. The methodology includes tools for the processing of seismic data based on the features of acquisition geometry, source estimation, first arrival tomography, plus the software strategies to meet the requirements of the FWI (memory and computation requirements). The document also includes a discussion of the results of velocity models obtained for a low-resolution Dip 2D line of the SEAM data, using a workstation with low-to-intermediate hardware requirements.