Efficient approach for quantifying uncertainty of wavefield reconstruction inversion

Due to the noisy measurements, sparse observations, uncertain forward models, and uncertain prior parameter information, significant uncertainty arises in the inverted velocity model of full-waveform inversion. The uncertain velocity model leads to the uncertainty in the correct positions of events in the migrated images, which subsequently influences the important decision-makings in the oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) business such as the drilling decisions and economic evaluations. Therefore, understanding the uncertainty in the inverted velocity model is essential for the mitigation of the E&P risks. A common approach to accounting for uncertainty in seismic inverse problems like full-waveform inversion is to describe the unknown parameters in probabilistic by the Bayesian inference. The Bayesian inference aims at incorporating the information from the data, physics, and one’s prior knowledge to formulate a posterior distribution function to characterize the statistical properties of the unknown parameters. However, characterizing uncertainties for the large-scale full-waveform inversion in seismic exploration is prohibitively expensive since it requires thousands of function evaluations to sample the parameter space (e.g. via Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling). Apart from this, the existing methods of uncertainty quantification for full-waveform inversion is through applying the Bayesian inference to the standard method such as the adjoint-state method with the assumption that no uncertainty arises from the wave-equation. However, the wave-equation may not be able to reflect all the physics, hence, incorporating uncertainty from wave-equation might benefit the quantification of uncertainty. In this work, we propose to perform uncertainty quantification using the recently proposed wavefield reconstruction inversion technique, which gives an appropriate framework to tackle the uncertainty in wave-equation solve by adding the misfit of the wave-equation to the likelihood distribution and relaxing the wave-equation constraint. Moreover, we propose a computationally feasible approach to analyzing the posterior distribution of the wavefield reconstruction inversion method, which incorporates a Gaussian distribution that approximates the posterior distribution with an optimization-driven Gaussian simulator to sample the Gaussian distribution efficiently. Numerical examples show that comparing to the McMC method, our approach is able to produce comparable results with less computational cost. This is joint work with Curt da Silva and Rachel Kuske.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SINBAD/2016/Fall...