Acoustic Full-waveform Inversion Strategy for Multi-component Ocean-bottom Cable Data

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is an optimization process of fitting observed and modeled data to reconstruct high-resolution subsurface physical models. In acoustic FWI (AFWI), pressure data acquired using a marine streamer has mainly been used to reconstruct the subsurface P-wave velocity models. With recent advances in marine seismic-acquisition techniques, acquiring multi-component data in marine environments have become increasingly common. Thus, AFWI strategies must be developed to effectively use marine multi-component data. Herein, we proposed an AFWI strategy using horizontal and vertical particle-acceleration data. By analyzing the modeled acoustic data and conducting sensitivity kernel analysis, we first investigated the characteristics of each data component using AFWI. Common-shot gathers show that direct, diving, and reflection waves appearing in the pressure data are separated in each component of the particle-acceleration data. Sensitivity kernel analyses show that the horizontal particle-acceleration wavefields typically contribute to the recovery of the long-wavelength structures in the shallow part of the model, and the vertical particle-acceleration wavefields are generally required to reconstruct long- and short-wavelength structures in the deep parts and over the whole area of a given model. Finally, we present a sequential-inversion strategy for using the particle-acceleration wavefields. We believe that this approach can be used to reconstruct a reasonable P-wave velocity model, even when the pressure data is not available.