NSERC 2014 DNOISE application

This current proposal describes a comprehensive five-year continuation of our research project in dynamic nonlinear optimization for imaging in seismic exploration (DNOISE). DNOISE III—Exploration Seismology in the Petascale Age builds on the proven track record of our multidisciplinary research team that conducts transformative research in the fields of seismic-data acquisition, processing, and wave-equation based inversion. The overarching goals of the DNOISE series of projects can be simply summarized as: ``How to image more deeply and with more detail?" and ``How to do more with less data?" Also, to help overcome the current substantial challenges in the oil and gas industry, we maintain this focus with more specific follow-up questions such as: ``How can we control costs and remove acquisition-related artifacts in 3D (time-lapse) seismic data sets?" and ``How can we replace conventional seismic data processing with wave-equation based inversion, control computational costs, assess uncertainties, extract reservoir information and remove sensitivity to starting models?" To answer these questions, we have assembled an expanded cross-disciplinary research team with backgrounds in scientific computing (SC), machine learning (ML), compressive sensing (CS), hardware design, and computational and observational exploration seismology (ES). With this team, we will continue to drive innovations in ES by utilizing our unparalleled access to high-performance computing (HPC), our expertise and experience in CS and wave-equation based inversion (WEI) and our proven abilities in incorporating our research findings into practical scalable software of our inversion solutions.