Envelope normalized reflection waveform inversion

Abstract The reflection waveform inversion has the capability to reconstruct the background velocity model using only the reflection data by employing a migration/demigration process. Utilizing the waveform discrepancy to update the background velocity model, the conventional reflection waveform inversion method heavily relies on the true‐amplitude migration/demigration technique to reproduce the primary amplitude information from the observed reflections. We can reproduce the amplitude of observed reflections by performing least‐squares reverse time migration to estimate the reflectivity in each iteration. However, this strategy is quite time‐consuming. To avoid the need for the true‐amplitude migration/demigration or least‐squares reverse time migration, we develop an amplitude‐independent reflection waveform inversion method that uses an envelope‐normalized objective function. The envelope‐normalized waveform difference can extract the phase residuals accurately as a function of time. Compared with the global energy–normalized misfit, our proposed envelope‐normalized objective function is essentially a phase‐matched measurement. At the same time, due to the amplitude independence of our proposed objective function, the subsequent weak reflections contribute with a similar weight to the total value of the misfit as the strong early reflections do. This makes it possible to recover the deep subsurface velocity. Synthetic data of the Sigsbee model and marine streamer field data applications validate that our amplitude‐independent reflection waveform inversion method can further improve the resolution and accuracy by aligning the reflection events of synthetic and observed data phase to phase without the need to perform true‐amplitude migration/demigration or least‐squares reverse time migration as in conventional reflection waveform inversion.