Application and Discussion of Diving-Wave Land Full-Waveform Inversion in Complex Mountainous Areas of Western China

The application of full-waveform inversion (FWI) to land seismic data remains challenging. Near-surface velocity model building exhibits specific difficulty, largely associated with low signal-to-noise ratio, elastic effects, rough topography and near-surface heterogeneities in the complex mountain surveys of Western China. The application of low-frequency signal enhancement and source wavelet estimation methods has improved dramatically and offers ideal conditions for FWI. At the same time, the inversion of limited frequency band (mainly at the low frequency) devotes to minimize cycle-skipping. A case study from the complex mountain area of Western China proves that diving-wave FWI is able to help with the model-building process, and the resulting velocity model reveals features that improve the migrated image and mitigate the uncertainty. The application of diving-wave FWI has been made on a widely area covering complex mountain area in Western China. The FWI-derived velocity model aids the geological interpretation by providing more details and higher resolution in areas of complex geology than that from ray-tracing tomography method.