Extending the Potential of Acoustic Optimal Transport FWI in the South of Oman

Summary Broadband land WAZ acquisitions provide the ideal data for land FWI thanks to low frequencies and long offsets. While acoustic FWI has been successful in the north of Oman, the complex near-surface geology and the presence of strong velocity contrasts in the south of Oman better fits with the use of elastic propagation to obtain an accurate velocity model. In this paper we discuss the challenge of improving acoustic land FWI results in the south of Oman, thus avoiding the use of elastic FWI, which is still prohibitively expensive for deriving high-resolution velocity models. The key success factors for this acoustic land FWI study were proper pre-processing of the input seismic data and the use of an Optimal Transport objective function to mitigate cycle skipping issues.