Subsurface cavity detection by Improved Reverse Time Migration with Full
Waveform Inversion: A Numerical Study
Abstract
Old abandoned coal working create major hazards in the form of
subsidence of the coalfields. To avoid such hazards, there is need to
detect these cavities prior to start of deeper seam mining. There are
number of geophysical techniques available for detecting subsurface
cavity. High-resolution seismic survey is one such technique which
provides accurate results as compared to others. Usually, most of the
seismic processing and interpretation of these cavity detection was
performed based on stacked data only. To understand these signatures
more precisely, in our study, an attempt has been made to image these
cavities with the help of Reverse Time Migration (RTM) combined with
Full Waveform Inversion (FWI). RTM mostly used for hydrocarbon
exploration targets with low central frequency as source. Application of
this method to shallow subsurface exploration is still in research
stage. Like the same way for velocity model updating, FWI gives mostly
appropriate optimization results as compare to other techniques, but it
also has the limitation to application of low frequency only. In this
paper we first develop a 2D realistic Water Filled Cavity (WFC) model
with a work flow of RTM combined with FWI in a high-frequency Ricker
source wavelet as 100 Hz. In order to provide a velocity model with high
accuracy for RTM, we apply FWI to estimate the subsurface velocity by
considering an initial smooth velocity model with addition of 30 %
Gaussian noise. The conventional RTM fails to image the cavities and
yield a large amount of low frequency back scattered noise at shallow
depth during the time of cross correlation due to time/space lag. To
avoid these situation, we introduced an automatic shift operator at the
time of imaging condition that operates automatically both in time or
space. It leads to reduce the lag and improve the results by minimizing
the noises at shallow subsurface. By comparing both the results it is
observed that most of the noises in the migrated section of conventional
method were eliminated by the improved form of RTM with the help of FWI
velocity model estimation.