Paper Summary
Multi-parameter Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) suffers from crosstalk (leakage) between the different medium properties. We propose a practical solution that minimizes the leakage and retrieves the long-wavelength features of the model. Our algorithm is based on a regularization of the objective function and a specific parameterization of an acoustic Transversely Isotropic (TI) medium: vertical velocity, and Thomsen parameters epsilon and delta. From this chosen parameterization the resulting vertical velocity sensitivity kernel produces long wavelength updates. For the inversion of epsilon, the long-wavelength updates are enforced by the application of total variation regularization (TV). We show, by using synthetic data, that TV regularization significantly reduces the 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.