Elastic Land Full-Waveform Inversion in the Middle East: Method and Applications

Applications of full-waveform inversion (FWI) to land data have proven much more challenging than to marine data. The difficulties are linked to a lower signal-to-noise ratio but also to a greater influ-ence of elastic wave phenomena in these data sets, especially those characterized by strong elastic property contrasts. The Middle East, where FWI-dedicated acquisitions and pre-processing work-flows have been developed, has emerged as a promising proving ground for land acoustic FWI. But it also proved to be challenging due to strong elastic effects from alternating fast and slow velocity layers in the shallow section. Elastic land FWI then appears as a natural solution to be investigated, especially considering that it becomes more practical thanks to the progresses of the computing ca-pacities. We study the potential of elastic land FWI to overcome the limitations of acoustic land FWI, through a set of synthetic and real data applications to typical challenging areas from the Mid-dle East. We show the improved data fitting leading to an increased resolution and stability that can be obtained with elastic land FWI compared to acoustic land FWI when inverting diving waves. We also present some preliminary inversion results of ultra-low frequency surface-waves obtained by interferometry.