Forge ahead in acquisition and model building via full-waveform inversion: Gulf of Mexico case study

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has proven itself an essential tool for velocity model building using seismic data. In recent years, the geophysical community has made substantial progress in developing FWI to overcome some long-standing limitations, such as handling cycle skipping, better using reflection energy, including more physics in the inversion algorithms, and increasing inverted frequencies to achieve higher resolution. FWI does not only target the larger and midscale model updates, more and more FWI examples were presented with increased resolution which allows for extraction of FWI derived reflectivity. Interrogating the FWI kernel with given geology and acquisition geometry can provide critical information on how the acquisition design should be optimized to provide FWI a better opportunity to update the velocity model at target depth, especially in the deep part of the model. When the acquisition geometry is different in terms of offsets, azimuthal coverage, and the minimum frequency in the recording, it can be analyzed to design workflows to enable FWI to optimally update the model parameters. Obviously, recent ocean-bottom node acquisitions that record long offsets, full azimuth, and low frequencies have made FWI shine in the seismic industry. Modifying and reshaping a complex salt geometry is one of the ultimate goals of FWI. In addition to the salt boundary being an issue, there is a potential cycle-skipping problem associated with uncertainties of large salt bodies missing or misplaced even though the frequencies used to start FWI are becoming lower due to the advancement in seismic acquisition and FWI algorithms. Furthermore, if the FWI-predicted data are simulated with an acoustic engine, it could pose amplitude and phase discrepancies at high-velocity contrast interfaces. Elastic FWI alone has been proposed as a means of overcoming these challenges associated with salt and regions with high-velocity contrast. We determine the FWI progress of the past few decades with the latest examples from different acquisition geometries.