Tutorial: acoustic full waveform inversion in time domain

Khalid A. Almuteri, Kristopher A. Innanen

Full waveform inversion (FWI) is an optimization problem that aims at extracting the earth’s physical parameters, from recorded seismic data, through an iterative inversion process. This paper reviews the concept of FWI and provides an environment where a single-parameter acoustic FWI problem can be solved in time domain. We cover the wave equation discretization, using a second-order finite difference approximation, Clayton-Engquist absorbing boundary conditions, modeling stability and grid dispersion, and we derive the gradient needed to solve this optimization problem.