Acoustic full-waveform inversion to match far-offset reflections with pseudo-horizontal particle acceleration data

In the early stage of acoustic full-waveform inversion (AFWI), it is important to exploit the long-wavelength features of the gradient and suppress its short-wavelength features to update the background velocity. However, due to strong near-offset PP reflections and multiples within the pressure data, conventional AFWI sometimes primarily reconstructs the short-wavelength features of a given model and fails to converge on a reliable subsurface P-wave velocity model. Therefore, this study, we propose the usage of pseudo-horizontal particle acceleration (pseudo-a_x) data for AFWI, rather than the original pressure data. Because the amplitudes of PP reflections are implicitly weighted according to the reflection angle in pseudo-a_x data, the near-offset PP reflections and multiples of the pseudo-a_x data are much weaker than those of the pressure data. As a result, AFWI using pseudo-a_x data focuses on reconstructing the longer-wavelength features of a given model in the early iterations, and then gradually reconstructs short-wavelength features as the inversion process continues. Using synthetic and real data examples for the Volve oilfield in the North Sea, we examined the effects and feasibility of this strategy. In the synthetic data example, the proposed strategy rapidly reduced far-offset data misfits related to long-wavelength feature updates and achieved smaller model misfits than the conventional strategy. The real data example showed that the velocity model reconstructed using the proposed strategy flattened some of the reflectors at the angle-domain common-image gathers (ADCIGs) better than the velocity model obtained using the conventional strategy. These findings demonstrate that our strategy converges closer to the real P-wave velocity model than the conventional strategy by building a hierarchical velocity model from long- to short-wavelength structures.