Source-independent time-domain vector-acoustic full-waveform inversion

Dual-sensor seismic acquisition systems that record the pressure and particle velocity allow the recording of the full-vector-acoustic (VA) wavefields. Most previous studies have focused on data-domain processing methods based on VA seismic data; whereas, few studies focused on using full-VA seismic data in full-waveform inversion (FWI). Conventional acoustic FWI only takes advantage of the pressure recordings to estimate the medium's velocity model. Some artifact events will appear in the adjoint-state wavefields based on the conventional acoustic FWI method. These artifact events further reduce the accuracy of acoustic FWI. To simultaneously use pressure and vertical particle velocity recordings, we introduced a new time-domain VA FWI method. The VA FWI method can take advantage of directivity information contained in the VA seismic data. Thus, the adjoint-state wavefields based on VA FWI are more accurate than those from the conventional acoustic FWI method. In addition, we applied a convolution-based objective function to eliminate the effects of the source wavelet and implement a time-domain multiscale strategy in VA FWI. Synthetic examples are presented to demonstrate that VA FWI can improve the accuracy of acoustic FWI in the presence and absence of a free surface in the acoustic case. In addition, VA FWI does not significantly increase the computation and memory costs, but it has better convergence when compared with conventional acoustic FWI.