Effective sources: removing the near surface from the VSP FWI problem

Scott Keating, Matthew Eaid, Kristopher A. Innanen

For land seismic surveys, the near-surface is often highly variable, resulting in a complex, substantial impact on data. This can make full-waveform inversion very difficult to apply on land seismic data sets, as accurate characterization of the near-surface can be extremely challenging. To cope with this challenge, we propose a full-waveform inversion strategy for removing the near-surface from the inversion problem in the case of vertical seismic profile data. To remove the near-surface from the inversion, we invert for both a subsurface model and a wavefield at a depth below the near-surface. In synthetic examples, we demonstrate that the inversion can accurately characterize the subsurface in this type of approach.