Land FWI: Challenges and possibilities

Land seismic presents more and different challenges for Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) than marine data. Among these challenges, the most fundamental ones are the irregular topography, strong nearsurface effects, and common FWI difficulties such as cycle-skipping and amplitude issues. In this work, we propose to deploy three strategies to deal with these difficulties respectively: curvilinear topography modelling to effectively model the irregular topography for the earth’s surface, mitigation of near-surface effects to reduce the negative impacts of strong near-surface noise, and a stable cost function as the foundation for land FWI to alleviate cycle-skipping and amplitude issues. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategies with two field data examples representing different geological settings. Based on learnings from these studies, we believe that land FWI is becoming more stable and consistent than before, and success can be expected on more land datasets.