Application of the unwrapped phase inversion to land data without source estimation

Abstract

Unwrapped phase inversion with a strong damping was developed to solve the phase wrapping problem in frequency-domain waveform inversion. In this study, we apply the unwrapped phase inversion to band-limited real land data, for which the available minimum frequency is quite high. An important issue of the data is a strong ambiguity of source-ignition time (or source shift) shown in a seismogram. A source-estimation approach does not fully address the issue of source shift, since the velocity model and the source wavelet are updated simultaneously and interact with each other. We suggest a source-independent unwrapped phase inversion approach instead of relying on source-estimation from this land data. In the source-independent approach, the phase of the modeled data converges not to the exact phase value of the observed data, but to the relative phase value (or the trend of phases); thus it has the potential to solve the ambiguity of source-ignition time in a seismogram and work better than the source-estimation approach. Numerical examples show the validation of the source-independent unwrapped phase inversion, especially for land field data having an ambiguity in the source-ignition time.