Suppressing position approximation imaging artifacts in full waveform modeling and inversion of marine seismic data.

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is an advanced seismic imaging method for determining high resolution velocity models of different scales, such as in subseafloor geo-hazard monitoring and risk analysis. Among all two-way wave-equation based modeling methods, a mixed-grid finite-difference modeling (FDM) in frequency domain has the advantage of low numerical dispersion errors for mesh size up to 1/4 wave-length. However, irregular source and receiver positions situated away from the FDM nodes introduce position approximation error (PAE) as large as half mesh size. When a source or receiver is situated in strong heterogeneity or near a free surface, the PAE induces imaging artifacts in high frequencies. We propose an imaging artifact suppression method for multi-scale FDM and FWI in marine seismic survey. The delta function of the source or receiver position is approximated by a discrete Kaiser-windowed sinc function in unbounded medium. The free-surface effects to sources and receivers are compensated with the mirror source concept. The final coefficients for delta function approximation and wavefield interpolation are spatially confined tensor products. The results using ocean bottom cable and vertical cable survey layouts in synthetic models validate the accuracy and feasibility of this new FDM and FWI strategy. The FWI tests shows that this strategy has reduced small scale artifacts at high frequencies for survey layouts of good and poor illuminations. The extension of our method to 3-D visco-acoustic model or reverse time migration is straightforward. • High resolution subseafloor geo-hazard monitoring. • Multi-scale visco-acoustic seismic inversion. • Seismic imaging artifacts suppression. • Positioning errors in marine environment. • Velocity model building for shallow marine strata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]