Challenges and developments arising from 2D FWI of a land VSP dataset in the Permian Basin

Full-waveform inversion was carried out to map 3D velocity structures for a site in the Permian Basin of Texas, USA. The data come from co-located surface and 3D VSP seismic surveys that share common source vibration points. This challenging on-land setting has been used as a testbed to evaluate our FWI algorithms and their effectiveness when applied to real-data problems. We discuss the challenges posed by this case study, and several new techniques and methodological refinements that have been developed and tested as a result. These include: regularization and incorporation of multiple datasets in an on-land FWI workflow; restrictions on the types of models allowed (viz., smoothness regularization) by quadratic penalty and by Projected Quasi-Newton (PQN) inversion; corrections to enable 2D FWI and recovery of 3D models; the state of ongoing work in WRI (``Penalty Method'' inversion) and the handling of anisotropy.