Building Detailed Structurally Conformable Velocity Models with High Definition Tomography

Velocity model building remains a crucial step in seismic depth imaging. A general drawback of conventional tomographic approaches is that the estimated velocity models do not conform enough to structures. We present several applications of an innovative high resolution tomography that inverts densely picked residual move-out data to reveal detailed structurally conformable velocities. The application to the synthetic 2D Marmousi II dataset offers the possibility to carefully assess the method. It demonstrates the ability to produce structurally conformable velocity models with a level of detail that promotes velocity attributes as an aid to geological interpretation. As such it can offer an alternative to full waveform inversion for the interpretation of reflected waves. Finally we show an application to a 3D land dataset where the obtained higher resolution velocity model results in improved focusing of migrated images and improved match to well velocities.