Application of a preconditioned 3D nonlinear seismic inverse method to marine field data

Although seismic imaging methods, combined with velocity-analysis methods, are efficient algorithms for solving the nonlinear seismic inverse problem, their results can be inaccurate due to inaccurate reference-model estimates and sparse sampling problems for typical 3-D acquisition geometries with gaps. In a previous paper (Sevink and Herman, 1995) , a pragmatic nonlinear iterative inverse method was developed for resolving these problems.