Paper Summary
Offshore Brazil comprises a diverse set of geological provinces, from the deepwater salt provinces of the Santos and Campos Basins to the less mature, structurally complex Equatorial Margins. Despite differing in tectonic history and depositional environments, these regions share common imaging challenges – strong impedance contrasts, stratigraphic heterogeneity, and complex salt or carbonate bodies – that hinder conventional velocity model building (VMB) workflows. While acoustic full-waveform inversion (aFWI) has proven useful for refining models, its simplifying assumptions often limit its effectiveness in these geologically demanding settings. This paper explores the application of elastic full-waveform inversion (eFWI) to towed-streamer datasets, demonstrating it can deliver meaningful improvements in subsurface velocity models across Brazil’s offshore basins using typical legacy seismic data that is abundant in the region.