Exploring applications of depth stepping in seismic inverse problems

We are exploring applications of stable depth extrapolation with the full wave equation to imaging and inversion. Depth stepping with full wave equation can be advantageous to the time and frequency domain modelling if special care is taken to stabilize the depth exptrapolator efficiently, since it reduces the higher dimensional modelling problem to a number of lower dimensional subproblems. We are interested in exploring applications in inversion, modelling and imaging. For example, just as the reverse time migration can be shown to be the gradient of the reduced formulation of the full waveform inversion problem, it is interesting to explore whether a formulation of the inversion problem can be achieved whose gradient can be computed using depth stepping techniques. We are also interested in such applications as preconditioning of iterative methods for Helmholtz equation and imaging.