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This paper contributes an open source software - SMIwiz, which integrates seismic modelling, reverse time migration (RTM), and full waveform inversion (FWI) into a unified computer implementation. SMIwiz has the machinery to do both 2D and 3D simulation in a consistent manner. The package features a number of computational recipes for efficient calculation of imaging condition and inversion gradient: a dynmaic evolving computing box to limit the simulation cube and a well-designed wavefield reconstruction strategy to reduce the memory consumption when dealing with 3D problems. The modelling in SMIwiz runs independently: each shot corresponds to one processor in a bijective manner to maximize the scalability. A batchwise job scheduling strategy is designed to handle large 3D imaging tasks on computer with limited number of cores. The viability of SMIwiz is demonstrated by a number of applications on benchmark models.

This paper delivers a software -- libEMM -- for 3D controlled-source electromagnetics (CSEM) modelling in fictitious wave domain, based on the newly developed high-order finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method on non-uniform grid. The numerical simulation can be carried out over a number of parallel processors using MPI-based high performance computing architecture. The FDTD kernel coded in C has been parallelized with OpenMP for speedup using local shared memory. In addition, the software features a GPU implementation of the same algorithm based on CUDA programming language, which can be cross-validated and compared in terms of efficiency. A perspective of libEMM on the horizon is its application to 3D CSEM inversion in land and marine environment.

Simulation of 3D low-frequency electromagnetic fields propagating in the Earth is computationally expensive. We present a fictitious wave domain high-order finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modelling method on nonuniform grids to compute frequency-domain 3D controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) data. The method overcomes the inconsistency issue widely present in the conventional 2nd order staggered grid finite difference scheme over nonuniform grid, achieving high accuracy with arbitrarily high order scheme. The finite-difference coefficients adaptive to the node spacings, can be accurately computed by inverting a Vandermonde matrix system using efficient algorithm. A generic stability condition applicable to nonuniform grids is established, revealing the dependence of the time step and these finite-difference coefficients. A recursion scheme using fixed point iterations is designed to determine the stretching factor to generate the optimal nonuniform grid. The grid stretching in our method reduces the number of grid points required in the discretization, making it more efficient than the standard high-order FDTD with a densely sampled uniform grid. Instead of stretching in both vertical and horizontal directions, better accuracy of our method is observed when the grid is stretched along the depth without horizontal stretching. The efficiency and accuracy of our method are demonstrated by numerical examples.

Marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) method has proved its potential in detecting highly resistive hydrocarbon bearing formations. A novel frequency domain CSEM inversion approach using fictitious wave domain time stepping modelling is presented. Using Lagrangian-based adjoint state method, the inversion gradient with respect to resistivity can be computed by the product between the forward and adjoint fields. Simulation of the adjoint field using the same modelling engine is challenging as it requires time domain adjoint source time functions while only a few discrete frequencies of the data residual are available for the inversion. A regularized linear inverse problem is formulated in order to estimate a long time series from very few frequency samples. It can then be solved using linear optimization technique, yielding a matrix-free implementation. Instead of computing adjoint source time function one by one at each receiver location, a basis function implementation has been developed such that the inverse problem can be solved only once and reused every time to construct all time-domain adjoint sources. The method allows computing all frequencies of the EM fields in one go without heavy memory and computational overhead, making efficient 3D CSEM inversion feasible. Numerical examples are employed to demonstrate the application of our method.

Full waveform inversion (FWI) updates the subsurface model from an initial model by comparing observed and synthetic seismograms. Due to high nonlinearity, FWI is easy to be trapped into local minima. Extended domain FWI, including wavefield reconstruction inversion (WRI) and extended source waveform inversion (ESI) are attractive options to mitigate this issue. This paper makes an in-depth analysis for FWI in the extended domain, identifying key challenges and searching for potential remedies towards practical applications. WRI and ESI are formulated within the same mathematical framework using Lagrangian-based adjoint-state method with a special focus on time-domain formulation using extended sources, while putting connections between classical FWI, WRI and ESI: both WRI and ESI can be viewed as weighted versions of classic FWI. Due to symmetric positive definite Hessian, the conjugate gradient is explored to efficiently solve the normal equation in a matrix free manner, while both time and frequency domain wave equation solvers are feasible. This study finds that the most significant challenge comes from the huge storage demand to store time-domain wavefields through iterations. To resolve this challenge, two possible workaround strategies can be considered, i.e., by extracting sparse frequencial wavefields or by considering time-domain data instead of wavefields for reducing such challenge. We suggest that these options should be explored more intensively for tractable workflows.