Some 3D applications of Full Waveform Inversion

Summary: Since 25 years, several synthetic and real examples of Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) have been published. The main advantages and limitations of this approach have been explained in the 80's. It was soon realized that FWI requires long offsets and low frequencies to update the velocity background. Thanks to the improvements in acquisition over the last 20 years, long offset data became available and several research groups could demonstrate the relevance of FWI with 2D data sets. Over the last 5 years, the increase in computer power made 3D FWI affordable at least with low frequency data. In this presentation, we will present some of the 3D FWI results we obtained. Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) or Ocean Bottom Cable (OBC) data sets are well suited to illustrate the power of FWI since they often contain long offsets, wide azimuth and low frequencies. We will then discuss the results we obtained on a Gulf of Mexico data set.