Anisotropic anelastic seismic full waveform modeling and inversion: Application to North Sea offset VSP data

In sedimentary basin, elastic anisotropy can be described by a transverse isotropic medium and the attenuation in the seismic bandwidth can be approximated by a quasi-constant quality factor. Very few full waveform inversions were conducted for such realistic media to show the feasibility and the benefit of this approach. For illustration, we have chosen two offset VSP datasets from the North Sea displaying attenuated phases and where the medium is known to be transverse isotropic. By inverting elastic parameters, anisotropy, shear attenuation and source functions, we have been able to find an Earth model reproducing fairly the real data. By exploiting all the information in the seismograms, full waveform inversion allows us to localize and characterize the Brent gas reservoir target.