Elastic Full Waveform Inversion with Angle Decomposition and Wavefield Decoupling

Full waveform inversion (FWI) is a powerful tool to understand the real complicated earth model. As FWI is a highly nonlinear problem and depends strongly on the initial model, how to effectively retrieve the large-scale background model is critical for the success of FWI. For elastic FWI (EFWI), the inversion challenge increases because the P-wave and S-wave are coupled together if no mode separation technologies are applied. In this article, we develop a new EFWI strategy, where we simultaneously implement the angle decomposition and mode separation for the wavefield. Based on the analysis of radiation patterns of different parameters and the fact that small scattering angles correspond to large-scale model perturbations, we can retrieve the large-scale background model of the P-wave velocity with pure small scattering angle P-P mode wavefield. On the other hand, the pure small scattering angle S-S, S-P, and P-S mode wavefields are used to estimate the large-scale background model of the S-wave velocity. The correctly retrieved large-scale background models further guarantee the success of subsequent fine structure retrieving for the P-and S-wave velocity models by using different wave modes. The proposed method is able to reduce the cycle-skipping problem and the multiparameter crosstalk problem simultaneously. Numerical examples show that the proposed method provides much improved inversion results than the conventional EFWI, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.