Partial wave analysis of seismic wave scattering

Shahpoor Moradi, Kristopher A. Innanen

Developments in seismic full waveform inversion have brought a renewed interest in the scattering picture of wave propagation in recent years. Our experience has been that advances in our understanding of particular aspects of scattering has led rapidly to a concurrent advance in our understanding of how to pose and analyze practical seismic inversion methods. In this research we study the partial wave analysis of elastic wave scattering in an isotropic radially heterogenous medium in the context of Born-approximation. We show that in the presence of a scatterer there is a phase shift in the outgoing scattered spherical elastic wave. We also obtain the scattering amplitudes for scattering of P- and S-wave in terms of phase shift for P-, SV- and SH-waves. We show that the phase shifts can be calculated using the Lippman-Schwinger integral equation. A clear and consistent theory of elastic partial wave scattering will lead to better sensitivity or Jacobian matrices, a critical matter for the success of elastic seismic full waveform inversion.