Acquisition and near-surface impacts on VSP mini-batch FWI and RTM imaging in desert environment

The SEG Advanced Modeling (SEAM) Arid benchmark model was designed to simulate an extremely heterogeneous low-velocity near surface (NS), which is typical of desert environments and typically not well characterized or imaged. Imaging of land seismic data is highly sensitive to errors in the NS velocity model. Vertical seismic profiling (VSP) partly alleviates the impact of the NS as the receivers are located at depth in the borehole. Deep learning (DL) offers a flexible optimization framework for full-waveform inversion (FWI), often outperforming typically used optimization methods. We investigate the quality of images that can be obtained from SEAM Arid VSP data by acoustic mini-batch reverse time migration (RTM) and full-waveform imaging. First, we focus on the effects of seismic vibrator and receiver array positioning and imperfect knowledge of the NS model when inverting 2D acoustic data. FWI imaging expectedly and consistently outperforms RTM in our tests. We find that the acquisition density is critical for RTM imaging and less so for FWI, while NS model accuracy is critical for FWI and has less effect on RTM imaging. Distributed acoustic sensing along the full length of the well provides noticeable improvement over a limited aperture array of geophones in imaging deep targets in both RTM and FWI imaging scenarios. Finally, we compare DL-based FWI imaging with inverse scattering RTM using the upgoing wavefield from the original SEAM data. Use of significantly more realistic 3D elastic physics for the simulated data generation and simple 2D acoustic inversion engine makes our inverse problem more realistic. We observe that FWI imaging in this case produces an image with fewer artifacts.