Full waveform inversion guided by travel time tomography

TL;DR

This paper enhances full waveform inversion (FWI) by integrating travel time tomography to incorporate low-frequency information, improving model accuracy and convergence, and accelerates computations using block multigrid methods.

Contribution

It introduces a joint FWI and travel time tomography approach to recover low-frequency data and proposes a block multigrid Krylov method to speed up Helmholtz equation solutions.

Findings

Joint inversion produces smoother, more accurate models.

Low-frequency information from travel time tomography improves FWI results.

Block multigrid methods significantly reduce Helmholtz equation solution time.

Abstract

Full waveform inversion (FWI) is a process in which seismic numerical simulations are fit to observed data by changing the wave velocity model of the medium under investigation. The problem is non-linear, and therefore optimization techniques have been used to find a reasonable solution to the problem. The main problem in fitting the data is the lack of low spatial frequencies. This deficiency often leads to a local minimum and to non-plausible solutions. In this work we explore how to obtain low frequency information for FWI. Our approach involves augmenting FWI with travel time tomography, which has low-frequency features. By jointly inverting these two problems we enrich FWI with information that can replace low frequency data. In addition, we use high order regularization, in a preliminary inversion stage, to prevent high frequency features from polluting our model in the initial stages of the reconstruction. This regularization also promotes the non-dominant low-frequency modes that exist in the FWI sensitivity. By applying a joint FWI and travel time inversion we are able to obtain a smooth model than can later be used to recover a good approximation for the true model. A second contribution of this paper involves the acceleration of the main computational bottleneck in FWI--the solution of the Helmholtz equation. We show that the solution time can be reduced by solving the equation for multiple right hand sides using block multigrid preconditioned Krylov methods.