Classical seismic inversion approaches like first arrival travel-time tomography or surface wave dispersion analysis are limited in their resolution to the size of the first Fresnel zone. By incorporating the full information content of the recorded seismic wavefield, the Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) method is able to resolve sub-wavelength structures with high fidelity.

Since 2014 the working group "Applied Geophysics" at the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel applies the FWI to seismic SH data with different degrees of complexity for near-surface characterization tasks related to archaeological prospection and engineering geophysics. In this talk, I will discuss 4 challenges which have to be tackled in order to successfully apply FWI to near-surface field data and draw appropriate conclusions from the inversion results.

1. To accurately model the dispersion properties of surface waves, required for waveform fitting in the FWI framework, intrinsic damping effects have to be incorporated into the underlying governing equations describing wave propagation in visco-elastic media. The impact of visco-elastic medium properties will be demonstrated for a field dataset, acquired to characterize the basement shape of a medieval canal in southern Germany.

2. Significant surface topography poses another challenge for accurate surface wave FD modelling on Cartesian grids. Possible solutions to this problem will be discussed for a SH dataset related to the archaeological prospection of the Danewerk fortification wall in northern Germany.

3. Each geophysical inversion approach requires a careful choice of smoothness constraints to distinguish subsurface structures from inversion artifacts. After introducing two approaches to incorporate model smoothness in the FWI workflow, different degrees of smoothness constraints will demonstrate the challenge to find the right balance between the suppression of inversion artifacts and loosing model resolution.

4. A very important question is how reproducible are FWI results? This is actually a very complicated problem, involving a wide range of aspects. Here, I want to focus on the effect of the inversion of SH-data with different polarity on the FWI result for the Danewerk problem. Archaeological excavations allow a groundtruthing of the inverted S-wave velocity models.

Note:
Invitations to the webinar will be sent out via E-Mail on gpistud and gpi-personal in the usual manner. Additionally, the information will be posted on the Seminar group on ILIAS. External interested people, please contact Mike Lindner.