3-D waveform tomography sensitivity kernels for anisotropic media

Abstract

The complications in anisotropic multi-parameter inversion lie in the trade-off between the different anisotropy parameters. We compute the tomographic waveform sensitivity kernels for a VTI acoustic medium perturbation as a tool to investigate this ambiguity between the different parameters. We use dynamic ray tracing to efficiently handle the expensive computational cost for 3-D anisotropic models. Ray tracing provides also the ray direction information necessary for conditioning the sensitivity kernels to handle anisotropy. The NMO velocity and η parameter kernels showed a maximum sensitivity for diving waves which results in a relevant choice of those parameters in wave equation tomography. The δ parameter kernel showed zero sensitivity; therefore it can serve as a secondary parameter to fit the amplitude in the acoustic anisotropic inversion. Considering the limited penetration depth of diving waves, migration velocity analysis based kernels are introduced to fix the depth ambiguity with reflections and compute sensitivity maps in the deeper parts of the model.