Pre-stack seismic inversion using a Rytov–WKBJ approximation.

Approaches to seismic modelling using integral methods, notably Born–WKBJ (Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin–Jeffreys), have seen an increase in applications in geophysical prospecting and near-surface exploration. Moreover, due to its linearity characteristic, which can fast and efficiently simulate full-waveform information, the Born–WKBJ based method performs well in seismic inversion. However, the Born approximation is the linearized wavefield simulation by Taylor expansion of the wavefield and omitting the high-order term, which cannot simulate the wavefield accurately, including the amplitude, phase and waveform information. For the seismic inversion, especially the amplitude variation with angle/offset (AVA/AVO) inversion, the amplitude is the most important element for estimating the parameters. In this paper, a Rytov–WKBJ approximation-based method, which can simulate the seismic amplitude information more accurately, is introduced to pre-stack seismic inversion. Besides, in order to improve the resolution of the inversion results, the ℓ_{1 − 2}-norm regularized basis pursuit inversion is introduced to the inversion algorithm. Then, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method with the zero-offset and angle-dependent seismic data simulation. The model tests show that the proposed method performs better than the conventional method significantly both on amplitude and phase of the seismic data. Finally, the inversion tests of synthetic and field seismic data indicate that the proposed method can obtain more accurate results with a higher resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]