Time-domain phase inversion

In this abstract, we present a strategy for seismic phase inversion. The amplitude spectrum of the calculated seismogram is replaced by that of the observed seismogram when forming a seismogram misfit function. The seismograms and the source wavelets are filtered, integrated, or differentiated for constructing well-behaved objective functions. Synthetic tests show that phase inversion can recover as much seismic velocity information as can full wave inversion. The potential advantages of phase inversion over full wave inversion are two fold: (1) The inversion does not require the knowledge of the source amplitude spectra which can be difficult to estimate for real data; (2) Phase inversion allows for poor starting models, which is important when the background velocity is not well known.