Plane-wave Full Waveform Inversion Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing Data in an Elastic Medium

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), an increasingly growing acquisition technique in the oil and gas exploration and seismology fields, has been used to record seismic signals using optical cables as receivers. With the development of imaging methods for DAS data, full waveform inversion (FWI) is been applied to DAS data to obtain high-resolution property models such as P- and S-velocity. However, because the DAS systems measure strain from the phase distortion between two points along optical cables, DAS data must be transformed from strain to particle velocity for FWI algorithms. In this study, a plane-wave FWI algorithm based on the relationship between strain and horizontal particle velocity in the plane-wave assumption is proposed to apply FWI to DAS data. Under the plane-wave assumption, strain equals the horizontal particle velocity, which is scaled by the velocity at the receiver position. This relationship was confirmed using a numerical experiment. Furthermore, 4-layer and modified Marmousi-2 velocity models were used to verify the applicability of the proposed FWI algorithm in various survey environments. The proposed FWI was implemented in land and marine survey environments and provided high-resolution P- and S-velocity models.