Seismic simultaneous inversion using a multi-damped subspace method

Seismic inversion of amplitude variation versus offset (AVO) plays a key role in seismic interpretation and reservoir characterization. The AVO inversion shall be a simultaneous inversion which inverts for three elastic parameters simultaneously: the P-wave impedance, the S-wave impedance and the density. Using only seismic P-wave reflection data with a limited source receiver offset range, the AVO simultaneous inversion can obtain two elastic parameters reliably, but is difficult to invert for the third parameter, usually the density term. To tackle this difficulty in the AVO simultaneous inversion, we employed a subspace inversion method in which we partitioned the elastic parameters into different subspaces. We parameterized each single elastic parameter with a truncated Fourier series and inverted for the Fourier coefficients. Because the Fourier coefficients of different wavenumber components have different sensitivities, we grouped the Fourier coefficients of low, medium and high wavenumber components into different subspaces. We further assigned different damping factors to the Hessian matrix corresponding to different wavenumber components within each subspace. This inversion scheme is referred to as a multi-damped subspace method. Both synthetic and field seismic data examples confirmed that the AVO simultaneous inversion with this multi-damped subspace method is capable to produce reliable estimation of the three elastic parameters simultaneously