Component analysis of 3D elastic 9C full waveform inversion: Ettlingen Line case study

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) is one of the most popular seismic imaging techniques. In the exploration scale, FWI has become one of the industrial standards and proven to be accurate. Following that trend, FWI in shallow seismic scale also starts to gain attraction in the past decade. Several publications have demonstrated and proposed workflow to tackle the challenges in shallow seismic scales, such as sparse and limited acquisition, weak signal to noise ratio, high complexity propagation due to the strong elastic effect, and strong attenuation. In this research, we focus on the analysis of the effect of multicomponent data in shallow seismic scale towards 3D elastic FWI. The experiment's target is the Ettlingen Line (EL), a defensive trench-line which was built by the German Troop in 1707, located at Rheinstetten, Germany. We perform both synthetic (using cartesian direction's source) and field data (using Galperin source) in order to demonstrate the effect of multi-component data on FWI. Sixteen component combinations are analyzed for each case. By doing so, we find out that incorporating multi-component data generally has a positive impact on FWI in terms of model and data misfit, especially if the horizontal components are taken into account. The importance of each component can be used for future shallow seismic acquisition design for FWI with similar conditions. © 2020 Society of Exploration Geophysicists.