An efficient method of 3-D elastic full waveform inversion using a finite-difference injection method for time-lapse imaging

Seismic full waveform inversion is an objective method to estimate elastic properties of the subsurface and is an important area of research, particularly in seismic exploration community. It is a data-fitting approach, where the difference between observed and synthetic data is minimized iteratively. Due to a very high computational cost, the practical implementation of waveform inversion has so far been restricted to a 2-D geometry with different levels of physics incorporated in it (e.g. elasticity/viscoelasticity) or to a 3-D geometry but using an acoustic approximation. However, the earth is three-dimensional, elastic and heterogeneous and therefore a full 3-D elastic inversion is required in order to obtain more accurate and valuable models of the subsurface. Despite the recent increase in computing power, the application of 3-D elastic full waveform inversion to real-scale problems remains quite challenging on the current computer architecture. Here, we present an efficient method to perform 3-D elastic full waveform inversion for time-lapse seismic data using a finite-difference injection method. In this method, the wavefield is computed in the whole model and is stored on a surface above a finite volume where the model is perturbed and localized inversion is performed. Comparison of the final results using the 3-D finite-difference injection method and conventional 3-D inversion performed within the whole volume shows that our new method provides significant reductions in computational time and memory requirements without any notable loss in accuracy. Our approach shows a big potential for efficient reservoir monitoring in real time-lapse experiments.