Elastic Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) of reflection data with a phase misfit function

Full Waveform Inversion of elastic dataset is challenging due to the complexity introduced by free-surface effects or P-S wave conversions among others. In this context, large offsets are preferred for inversion because they favor transmission modes which are more linearly related to P-wave velocity. In this paper, we present an original approach which allows to dynamically select the near offset at each frequency. We illustrate this approach with the inversion of a dataset without density. In order to deal with a more realistic scenario, we next present the inversion with density effects included into the modeling. As inverting density is known to be a hard task, we choose to not invert it. This approach leads to the use of a phase misfit function, which is more connected to the kinematics of the problem than the classic L2 norm. The authors want to thank Repsol for the permission to publish the present research, carried out at the Repsol-BSC Research Center. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sk lodowska-Curie grant agreement No 644202.