"Recent advances in full-waveform inversion (FWI) algorithms have allowed it to work stably and effectively in different geological settings, especially in areas with geobodies of large impedance contrast such as salt, despite its presently taken acoustic assumption. This has resulted in a leap in salt velocity model building over the conventional interpretation-driven approach, providing much-improved salt models and step-change subsalt images. Furthermore, it produces directly interpretable FWI Images, normal derivative of the FWI velocities, that is now widely accepted as another step change for subsalt imaging. However, elastic effects at the large impedance contrast cause smearing of the salt boundary and a considerable salt halo in acoustic FWI results. Elastic FWI can model the energy at large impedance contrasts with better amplitudes and phases. This intrinsically reduces data mismatch between synthetic and real data and improves the convergence of FWI. We demonstrate with a real data example that elastic FWI Image gives more balanced amplitude, improved event continuity and higher S/N than its acoustic counterpart."

Ping Wang received a B.S. degree (1997) in Geophysics from Peking University and a Ph.D. degree (2006) in Geophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then worked as a Post-Doctorate Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he joined CGGVeritas (now CGG) in 2009. Currently, he serves as Vice President of Research at CGG and continues to work closely in seismic imaging research and applications. ​