Full Waveform Inversion: Confronting Conventional and Blended Acquisition

This work compares the possible impact and improvement of the blended acquisition in the context of the full waveform inversion (FWI) in comparison with the conventional acquisition. In the blended acquisition scheme, the possibility of overlapping shot-records allows acquiring densely sampled data within the same acquisition time. In this configuration it also becomes more feasible the recording of longer offset data and with a wider range of azimuths. This data is crucial for outlining dipping structures and flanks of salt domes in inversion algorithms. The extra data originated from the blended acquisition is important for the stability of the FWI, when compared with severely under-sampled and noisy data. Also, the blended data is convenient in the proposed FWI methodology since the deblending procedure of the data (i. e., separation of the interference between shots) in not necessary. The presented numerical results on the Marmousi model show how the blended acquisition data aids the convergence of the inversion algorithm, specially with a low signal to noise ratio data.