Paper submitted to IMAGE 2026, by Guanghui Huang, Jaime Ramos-Martínez, Dan Whitmore, Carlos Calderón-Macías (TGS).
Abstract
There is growing interest in assessing the value of full waveform inversion (FWI) for applications beyond structural seismic imaging, particularly in marine environments where hydrophone data are predominant. Here, we first present a theoretical FWI framework for jointly estimating P-wave velocity (vp), density (ρ) and S-wave velocity (vs) from pressure measurements. We validate the approach with a controlled numerical experiment that simulates streamer acquisition in a deep-water setting. Our results indicate that, although updates to vs and ρ predominantly capture local contrasts, elastic FWI can still recover meaningful variations in these parameters which are valuable for quantitative information. We apply our approach to field data acquired offshore Brazil. We validate our results from available well-log information.
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