Using common information in compressive time-lapse full-waveform inversion

The use of time-lapse seismic data to monitor changes in the subsurface has become standard practice in industry. In addition, full-waveform inversion has also been extended to time-lapse seismic to obtain useful time-lapse information. The computational cost of this method are becoming more pronounced as the volume of data increases. Therefore, it is necessary to develop fast inversion algorithms that can also give improved time-lapse results. Rather than following existing joint inversion algorithms, we are motivated by a joint recovery model which exploits the common information among the baseline and monitor data. We propose a joint inversion framework, leveraging ideas from distributed compressive sensing and the modified Gauss-Newton method for full-waveform inversion, by using the shared information in the time-lapse data. Our results on a realistic synthetic example highlight the benefits of our joint inversion approach over a parallel inversion method that does not exploit the shared information. Preliminary results also indicate that our formulation can address time-lapse data with inconsistent acquisition geometries.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/EAGE/2015/oghene...