Reduction of noise effect on elastic full waveform inversion by using plane-wave data

Abstract

Elastic full waveform inversion (FWI) is high-resolution subsurface imaging tool, which can provide more information than acoustic FWI. However, the reduction of noise effect is essential for the successful elastic FWI because it is more sensitive to noise than acoustic one. We propose a plane-wave method which can remarkably enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of input data used in elastic FWI by applying plane-wave transformation to shot gathers. In addition, the computational efficiency of this plane-wave method is better than conventional shot gather method because the number of input data is also reduced by plane-wave transformation. Numerical examples clearly show that plane-wave data have improved SNR compared with conventional shot gathers and elastic FWI with plane-wave data provides improved images than conventional FWI especially for the deep part of P- and Swave velocities and the whole regions of density.