Full-waveform seismic inversion

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a computational technique for analysing seismic data that can build high-resolution high-fidelity three-dimensional quantitative models of physical properties in the subsurface. FWI is widely used within the oil and gas industry and elsewhere across the earth sciences, and it has potential to image the Earth on a wide variety of scales. The technique has recently risen to prominence after it has been demonstrated to produce spectacular improvements in pre-stack depth-migrated seismic images beneath heterogeneous overburden.

Warner et al (2013) Anisotropic 3D full-waveform inversion, Geophysics, 78, R59–R80.

Anisotropic 3D full-waveform inversion

Computer codes that can perform 2D & 3D isotropic and anisotropic VTI and TTI acoustic, visco-acoustic and elastic full-waveform inversion on full-size field datasets have been developed at Imperial College London. These codes are designed to run on large parallel clusters of multi-core compute nodes.

Commercial access to these programs is available through membership of the FULLWAVE research consortium.

• Consortium members can access the website here

Application of the programs to academic problems can be arranged through collaboration with Imperial College London.

• Contact us here