INVERSE-THEORY APPLIED TO MULTISOURCE CROSS-HOLE TOMOGRAPHY .1. ACOUSTIC WAVE-EQUATION METHOD

Frequency‐domain methods are well suited to the imaging of wide‐aperture cross‐hole data. However, although the combination of the frequency domain with the wavenumber domain has facilitated the development of rapid algorithms, such as diffraction tomography, this has also required linearization with respect to homogeneous reference media. This restriction, and association restrictions on source‐receiver geometries, are overcome by applying inverse techniques that operate in the frequency‐space domain. In order to incorporate the rigorous modelling technique of finite differences into the inverse procedure a nonlinear approach is used. To reduce computational costs the method of finite differences is applied directly to the frequency‐domain wave equation. The use of high speed, high capacity vector computers allow the resultant finite‐difference equations to be factored in‐place. In this way wavefields can be computed for additional source positions at minimal extra cost, allowing inversions to be generated using data from a very large number of source positions. Synthetic studies show that where weak scatter approximations are valid, diffraction tomography performs slightly better than a single iteration of non‐linear inversion. However, if the background velocities increase systematically with depth, diffraction tomography is ineffective whereas non‐linear inversion yields useful images from one frequency component of the data after a single iteration. Further synthetic studies indicate the efficacy of the method in the time‐lapse monitoring of injection fluids in tertiary hydrocarbon recovery projects. Copyright © 1990, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved