Full-waveform inversion for near-surface heterogeneities in a shallow marine environment

In this abstract, we explore the feasibility of applying fullwaveform inversion for sand channels that lie near the water bottom in a shallow, marine environment. A modelling study shows that the kinematic effect of these sand channels on the first breaks may be quite small, although the effect is sufficient to enable them to be inverted. The first phase of our inversion effort for a field dataset thus consists of a synthetics inversion study in which we demonstrate accurate recovery of sand channels as small as 500 m in width using frequencies below 15 Hz.