An efficient methodology for inverting seismic data for 2D viscoelastic structures and its application to long-offset streamer data offshore Sumatra

Full waveform inversion aims at retrieving the material properties of the subsurface by iteratively minimising the differences between observed and synthetic data. Full waveform inversion has been first formulated and used for acoustic waves. However, the acoustic approximation is not always valid and the full waveform inversion technique has been extended to more complex physical assumptions such as the viscoelastic assumption in order to account for the attenuating nature of the Earth's materials. The aim of this thesis is to make use of viscoelastic full waveform inversion, by carefully taking into consideration sensitivities in order to assess strategies for its successful application and to apply the technique to a real dataset acquired offshore Sumatra.