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Application of Acoustic FWI in a Deep-Water Environment Using Towed Streamer Data
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, 80th EAGE Conference and Exhibition 2018, Jun 2018, Volume 2018, p.1 - 5
Abstract
FWI to extract velocity models has been successfully applied in shallow-water environments by exploiting refracted and turning wave information. In deep-water environments with a limited recorded offset length (∼10 km), FWI is more challenging due to there being less refracted energy to control the inversion process. We demonstrate the applicability of acoustic FWI method in a deep-water environment with towed streamer seismic data, acquired in the Orange Basin, South Africa. To do this, we use a highly accurate traveltime tomographic image ( Jelani and Booth, 2017 ) as a starting model, and we initially invert the very lowest frequency components in order to mitigate the non-linearity issue. We applied a variety of strategies of data pre-processing, pre-conditioning, wavenumber filtering, and re-estimating the source signatures to optimize the FWI results. The inverted velocity model was validated by a comparison of the observed and predicted waveforms. The kinematics of the predicted wavefield shows a reasonably good agreement with the observed waveform as well as a good correlation with the velocity image corresponding to the reflector on the PSDM seismic image. Further advances are anticipated to incorporate amplitude information with higher frequencies >6.0 Hz, in order to investigate the attenuation effects within the modelled space.