Paper Summary

The recent virtual EAGE 2020 conference included an interesting discussion on High frequency FWI. Whilst the short-term motivation is to deliver fast-track interpretation products with an abbreviated processing flow, the ambition of seismic inversion has always been to recover high-resolution elastic medium properties from the earth. After reviewing the traditional separation between low wavenumber background model building with FWI and high wavenumber reflectivity imaging, I consider the nature of the reflectivity resolved by running traditional FWI to high frequencies. The issue of whether FWI is imaging multiples by nature of being one form of a Least-Squares Reverse Time Migration (LS-RTM) is also considered. This discussion hopefully helps understood the products delivered by high frequency FWI.