Studying seismic wave propagation through complex media is crucial to numerous aspects of geophysics and engineering including seismic hazard assessment. In particular, small-scale structure such as sedimentary basins and their edges can have significant effects on high-frequency earthquake ground motion, which is the main cause for the damage to buildings and infrastructure. However, such structural effects are poorly understood due to limitations in numerical and analytical methods. To overcome this challenge, for the first time, we utilize the 3D printing technique to build a scaled-down physical representation of geological structure and perform lab-scale seismic experiments on it. Specifically, a physical model based on the Los Angeles Basin is printed and used as synthetic medium to propagate ultrasonic waves, to mimic seismic wave propagation from local earthquakes. Our results show clear body and surface waves recorded at expected time and locations, as well as waves that are scattered from the basin edges. We find that high-frequency energies are significantly reduced at the basin, which is at odds with the conventional view of basins as ground motion amplifiers. This novel waveform modeling approach with 3D printed Earth models is largely automated and provides an effective means to tackle geophysical problems of significance.

Because of its computational efficiency, Kirchhoff migration is the method of choice for 3D prestack depth migration, particularly in the initial velocity model-building stages where several iterations of migration are necessary. In the beginning, Kirchhoff migration used traveltimes calculated by either eikonal solvers or asymptotic ray theory, while amplitudes were calculated using relatively smooth geometrical spreading and obliquity considerations. More recently, Kirchhoff migration has been generalized to include more than one arrival time, with amplitudes calculated from geometrical optics, solution of the transport equations, or Gaussian beams (e.g., Hill, 2001).

Laplace-domain waveform inversion (WI) is generally used to generate smooth initial velocity models for frequency- or time-domain full-waveform inversion. However, in the inversion results of Laplace-domain WI, anomalies such as salt domes are sometimes shifted. We evaluate the “gradient-distortion effect” that causes undesirable changes in parameter updates and found that this is caused by the relationship between the partial derivatives of Laplace wavefields with respect to two different parameters. By analyzing the gradient of the Laplace-domain misfit function, we found that the gradient distortion effect increases as the Laplace constants used in the Laplace-domain WI decrease. The velocity model inverted in the Laplace domain is generally blurred from shallower parameters to deeper parameters because the partial derivatives of the Laplace wavefields with respect to shallower parameters tend to be larger than those of deeper parameters. We found two solutions for suppressing the gradient distortion effect. The first one is the sequentially ordered Laplace constant approach with multiple Laplace constants. We discover that a dense, broad set of Laplace constants should be sequentially used in this approach. The second solution is the Gauss-Newton method, in which the Hessian matrix is considered. Numerical tests performed using a four-layer model and the BP benchmark model show the gradient distortion effect appeared in the inversion results and the effectiveness of the sequentially ordered Laplace constant approach. In addition, tests using an inverted BP benchmark model determine that the inversion results can be improved by applying a broad, dense set of Laplace constants to synthetic data. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the Gauss-Newton method at suppressing the gradient distortion effect using the BP benchmark model.

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is widely used to infer earth structures and rock properties. In FWI, most of the computation arises from the repeated simulations of wave propagation. Although frequency-domain implementations have several advantages, solving the Helmholtz equation incurs a major computational cost associated with the inversion of large matrices. Hence, we have used a new model reduction technique called the generalized multiscale finite-element method (GM FEM) to perform this task rapidly for forward and backward simulations. This in turn leads to the acceleration of the FWI. In addition, the multiscale finite-element approach allows flexible, adaptive selection of modeling parameters (i.e., grid size, number of basis functions) for different target frequencies, providing further speed up. We apply this frequency-domain, multiscale FEM approach to the Marmousi-2 model, and the FWI results indicated how varying the number of basis functions can control the trade-off between the accuracy and computational speed. In addition, we introduced FWI examples applied to field data from the Gulf of Mexico. These field data examples indicate that applying our multiscale FWI with a relatively small number of basis functions can quickly construct a macrovelocity model using low frequencies. We also evaluate a strategy to optimize the FWI procedure by using frequency-adaptive multiscale basis functions based on the target frequency group. In general, we can reduce the run time by up to 30% through the application of GM FEM wave modeling in FWI.

Laplace domain waveform inversion (WI) is one of the most effective algorithms to generate an initial velocity model. Because of its bandwidth independence with respect to the source wavelet, this method can yield reasonable initial models without low-frequency components in the seismic data. However, the conventional Laplace domain WI algorithm has an accuracy problem from its simultaneous consideration of the first arrival traveltime and apparent amplitude in the Laplace domain wavefield. This simultaneous consideration creates undesirable cross-correlation terms between the residual of the traveltime and the partial derivatives of the apparent amplitude in the gradient directions and between the residual of the apparent amplitude and the partial derivatives of the traveltime in the gradient directions. In this paper, we introduce a new objective function that uses a shifted Laplace domain wavefield to solve the problem of Laplace domain WI. Information that is associated with the traveltime and apparent amplitude can be separately inverted by using this shifted Laplace domain WI. This separation of the information can suppress the undesirable cross-correlation terms between the residual of the traveltime and the partial derivatives of apparent amplitude and between the residual of the apparent amplitude and the partial derivatives of the traveltime in the gradient directions. We can effectively perform shifted Laplace domain modelling by using the damped monochromatic wave equation. We verify the accuracy of this shifted Laplace domain modelling scheme by comparing the shifted Laplace-transformed result from a synthetic seismogram to a wavefield that is modelled in the shifted Laplace domain. We perform a contribution analysis to demonstrate that the shifted Laplace domain wavefield is essential to improve the accuracy of the inverted results. Finally, we confirm the robustness of the shifted Laplace domain WI algorithm by testing it against a BP model.