A recipe for practical full waveform inversion in anisotropic media

In representing the most common (first-order influence, and gravity induced) acoustic anisotropy, transversely isotropic with a vertical symmetry direction (VTI) medium, with the P-wave normal moveout velocity, delta, and eta, we obtain a perturbation radiation pattern that has limited tradeoff between the parameters. Since delta is weakly resolvable from the kinematics of wave propagation, we can use it to play the role that density plays in improving the data fit for an imperfect physical model that ignores the elastic nature of the Earth. An FWI scheme that starts from diving waves would benefit from representing the acoustic VTI model with the P-wave horizontal velocity, eta, and epsilon. In this representation, the diving waves will help us first resolve the horizontal velocity, and then reflections, if the nonlinearity is properly handled, could help us resolve eta, while epsilon comes at the end to improve the amplitude fit (instead of the density). The model update wavelength for acoustic anisotropic FWI is very much similar to that experienced for the isotropic case. Copyright © 2014 by the European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers. All rights reserved.