Anacoustic FWI: Implementation and challenges

Scott Keating, Kristopher A. Innanen

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) estimates subsurface properties by minimizing differences between synthetic and observed data. It is important for the success of FWI that the synthetic modeling can reproduce the physical mechanisms which give rise to the observed data. Attenuation plays a prominent role in wave propagation, and thus its inclusion in FWI is desirable. An anacoustic FWI is not a trivial extension of FWI however, and problems arise when incautiously applying the same optimization, regularization, and frequency band updating strategies. Specific problems like these and some of their solutions are outlined in this report.