Surface Wave Attenuation Using Elastic Multi-Parameter Full Waveform Inversion

Summary One long-standing challenge in land seismic processing is accurate modeling and attenuation of aliased surface waves, which distort signals from deeper structures and lead to poor S/N. We propose a method based on elastic full waveform inversion (FWI) discretized using the spectral element method to model and attenuate surface waves from the recorded data. This method first reconstructs surface waves by estimating a relatively shallow earth model via elastic multi-parameter FWI. The reconstructed surface waves are then used through an adaptive subtraction process to remove the surface waves from the recorded seismograms. The proposed method does not impose any 1-D assumption as does by conventional dispersion-based modeling approach, and hence can model complicated wave phenomena, including back scattered surface waves. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method using the SEAM II Arid model.