Parsimonious wave-equation travel-time inversion for refraction waves

Lei Fu, Sherif M. Hanafy, Gerard T. Schuster

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a parsimonious wave-equation travel-time inversion technique for refraction waves. A dense virtual refraction dataset can be generated from just two reciprocal shot gathers for the sources at the endpoints of the survey line, with N geophones evenly deployed along the line. These two reciprocal shots contain approximately 2N refraction travel times, which can be spawned into O(N2) refraction travel times by an interferometric transformation. Then, these virtual refraction travel times are used with a source wavelet to create N virtual refraction shot gathers, which are the input data for wave-equation travel-time inversion. Numerical results show that the parsimonious wave-equation travel-time tomogram has about the same accuracy as the tomogram computed by standard wave-equation travel-time inversion. The most significant benefit is that a reciprocal survey is far less time consuming than the standard refraction survey where a source is excited at each geophone location.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1452-1461
Number of pages10
JournalGeophysical Prospecting
Volume65
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 14 2017

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Parsimonious wave-equation travel-time inversion for refraction waves'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this