Simultaneous recovery of source locations, moment tensors and subsurface models in 2D FWI

Scott Keating, Kristopher A. Innanen

Full waveform inversion (FWI) can provide accurate estimates of a variety of mechanical properties in the subsurface. Very often, FWI is used to recover subsurface properties in situations where source properties are well understood. Other seismic inversion strategies exist for the recovery of unknown source properties, and these typically assume a known, simple model of subsurface mechanical properties. In practice, there exist many situations in which a better understanding of both the subsurface model and the seismic sources is desirable. As each of these properties can influence our estimate of the other, it may sometimes be necessary to simultaneously recover both a subsurface model and a characterization of sources. In this report, we propose such a simultaneous inversion, using a FWI approach. We show in a simple synthetic example that this approach can be effective in recovering sources and subsurface models, though some results suggest that sequential inversion approaches may be similarly effective in many settings.