Parsimonious Surface Wave Interferometry

To decrease the recording time of a 2D seismic survey from a few days to one hour or less, we present a parsimonious surface-wave interferometry method. Interferometry allows for the creation of a large number of virtual shot gathers from just two reciprocal shot gathers by crosscoherence of trace pairs, where the virtual surface waves can be inverted for the S-wave velocity model by wave-equation dispersion inversion (WD). Synthetic and field data tests suggest that parsimonious wave-equation dispersion inversion (PWD) gives S-velocity tomograms that are comparable to those obtained from a full survey with a shot at each receiver. The limitation of PWD is that the virtual data lose some information so that the resolution of the S-velocity tomogram can be modestly lower than that of the S-velocity tomogram inverted from a conventional survey.