Viscoacoustic WRI - obstacles for multi-parameter cycle-skipping strategies?

Scott Keating, Kristopher A. Innanen

The obstacle of cycle-skipping in full-waveform inversion has led to the development of many non-L2 objective functions with better convexity properties. While these are effective in their goal of mitigating cycle skipping, they are typically investigated only with a single-parameter inversion formulation. If simultaneous multi-parameter inversion is to be an effective technology, it is important to understand how these objective functions behave when more than one medium property is considered. Here, we investigate the behaviour of one such strategy, wavefield reconstruction inversion, in the case of simultaneous viscoacoustic inversion. We find that prohibitive cross-talk between inversion variables is recovered when adopting this approach.