Time-lapse full-waveform inversion strategies for Snowflake datasets acquired at Newell County Facility in Alberta, Canada

The Newell County Facility is a pilot-scale project initiated in Alberta, Canada, with CO2 monitoring research led by the CREWES Project (Consortium for Research in Elastic Wave Exploration Seismology). Prior to CO2 injection in 2018, the Snowflake I dataset was acquired through a multi-offset and multi-azimuth VSP survey. After injecting approximately 60 tons of CO2, the Snowflake II dataset was obtained. In this study, we select four out of several time-lapse monitoring strategies using full-waveform inversion (FWI) to evaluate their accuracy and apply them to real field data. Initially, we perform synthetic 4D seismic monitoring to find optimal FWI settings and to analyze characteristic of different update strategies. Subsequently, we extend our comparison to the real seismic monitoring data (Snowflake datasets) to find an optimal update strategy at Newell County Facility. Through these processes, we have concluded that the velocity drops due to injected CO2 are well detected from Snowflake datasets using FWI with the parallel strategy.