GENERALIZATION OF TRAVELTIME INVERSION

A nonlinear inversion method is presented, especially suited for the determination of global velocity models. In a certain sense, it can be considered as a generalization of methods based on traveltimes of reflections, with the requirement of accurately having to determine traveltimes replaced by the (less stringent and less subjective) requirement of having to define time windows around main reflections (or composite reflections) of interest. It is based on an error norm, related to the phase of the wavefield, which is directly computed from wavefield measurements. Therefore, the cumbersome step of interpreting arrivals and measuring arrival times is avoided. The method is applied to the reconstruction of a depth-dependent global velocity model from a set of plane-wave responses and is compared to other methods. Despite the fact that the new error norm only makes use of data having a temporal bandwidth of a few Hz, its behavior is very similar to the behavior of the error norm used in traveltime inversion.