An effective multi-parameter Full Waveform Inversion in acoustic anisotropic media

Multi-parameter Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) suffers from leakage among different medium properties. Here we discuss a practical multi-parameter FWI solution that minimizes leakage and retrieves the long-wavelength features of the anisotropic earth model. Our algorithm is based on a regularization of the objective function and a specific parameterization of an acoustic Transversely Isotropic (TI) medium consisting of the vertical velocity, and Thomsen parameters epsilon and delta. We show, by using synthetic data, that Total Variation (TV)regularization significantly reduces leakage of the vertical velocity in the epsilon model during the inversion. Finally, we show an application on field data from the Gulf of Mexico where the flatness of the common image gathers is significantly improved.