Elastic Full Waveform Inversion of Vertical Seismic Profile data acquired with Distributed Acoustic Sensors

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a rapidly developing technology particularly useful for the acquisition of vertical seismic profile (VSP) surveys. DAS data are increasingly used for seismic imaging, but not for estimating rock properties. We propose a workflow for estimating elastic properties of the subsurface using full waveform inversion (FWI) of DAS VSP data. Whereas conventional borehole geophones usually measure three components of particle velocity, DAS measures a single quantity, which is an approximation of the strain or strain rate along the fiber. Standard FWI algorithms are developed for particle velocity data, and hence their application to DAS data requires conversion of these data to particle velocity along the fiber. This conversion can be accomplished by a specially designed filter. Field measurements show that the conversion result is close to vertical particle velocity as measured by geophones. Elastic time-domain FWI of a synthetic multi-offset VSP dataset for a vertical well sho...