Facies-constrained FWI: Toward application to reservoir characterization

The most common approach to obtaining reservoir properties from seismic data exploits the amplitude variation with offset response of reflected waves. However, structural complexity and errors in the velocity model can severely reduce the quality of the inverted results. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has shown a lot of promise in obtaining high-resolution velocity models for depth imaging. We propose supplementing FWI with rock-physics constraints obtained from borehole data to invert for reservoir properties. The constraints are imposed by adding appropriately weighted regularization terms to the objective function. The advantages of this technique over conventional FWI algorithms are shown by conducting synthetic tests for both isotropic and VTI (transversely isotropic with a vertical symmetry axis) models. The medium parameterization for FWI is selected using radiation (scattering) patterns of perturbations in the model parameters.