A parameterization study for elastic VTI Full Waveform Inversion of hydrophone components: synthetic and North Sea field data examples

Choosing the right parameterization to describe a transversely isotropic medium with a vertical symmetry axis (VTI) allows us to match the scattering potential of these parameters to the available data in a way that avoids potential tradeoff and focus on the parameters to which the data are sensitive. For 2-D elastic full waveform inversion in VTI media of pressure components and for data with a reasonable range of offsets (as with those found in conventional streamer data acquisition systems), assuming that we have a kinematically accurate NMO velocity (vnmo) and anellipticity parameter η (or horizontal velocity, vh) obtained from tomographic methods, a parameterization in terms of horizontal velocity vh, η and ε is preferred to the more conventional parameterization in terms of vh, δ and ε. In the vh, η, ε parameterization and for reasonable scattering angles (