FWI with source illumination: A synthetic case study

Babatunde Arenrin, Gary F. Margrave, John C. Bancroft

We study incorporating well log information into Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) and compare the result with a line search optimization scheme. We test this approach using a poor starting model i.e. a linear velocity v(z) model and also using smoothed version of the true velocity model. Our results show that incorporating well information into FWI saves a lot of computational time compared with a line search optimization scheme. Although the inverted model is far from convergence, we learn a few interesting things: conventional FWI cannot by itself provide good estimate for layer properties when the starting model is poor such as the case of a linear v(z) model, the information from well logs can be used to constrain the line search calculation and still save computational time, finally low frequencies are crucial for convergence.