Elastic seismic envelope inversion

We propose the elastic seismic envelope inversion method, which is an extension of our previous work about the acoustic situation. Seismic full waveform inversion suffers severely from the local minima problem, which comes from the lack of low frequency information in the data. The envelope of the data carries ultra low frequency information and thus can be used to construct the large scale component of the model. We give the method of envelope inversion for the elastic situation where P-wave velocity and S-wave velocity are inverted simultaneously. Numerical examples using the Marmousi II model proved that the combined elastic envelope inversion plus waveform inversion (EI+WI) provides much better results than the conventional elastic full waveform inversion, especially for the case of lacking low frequency information in the seismic data.