Utilizing diffractions in full-wave inversion for a detailed model building

Limitations in conventional marine seismic surveys such as detailed model building of local near-surfaces anomalies, e.g., gas pockets, motivate a quest for both alternative acquisition technologies, e.g., ocean-bottom nodes or cable and unconventional seismic processing. In this paper, we will first review one of the unconventional seismic technologies, diffraction imaging. Then, we will present our flow to build detailed velocity models exploiting seismic data recorded by ocean-bottom nodes. The model building consists of traveltime tomography based on fast-sweeping kernel and subsequently applied full-wave inversion. We show by a synthetic data example, that the diffractivity component of the wavefield leads to a detailed and well-resolved velocity model while ignoring it decreases spatial resolution of models. We also address a potential extension of the proposed model building for time-lapse applications.