Frequency-domain acoustic full waveform inversion with an embedded boundary method for irregular topography

In the implementation of full waveform inversion (FWI) to identify subsurface velocity distributions with land seismic data, which are often acquired in regions with irregular topography, wave equation-based modelling requires caution. In particular, when using the finite difference method (FDM), unwanted scattered waves are generated because irregular surfaces crossing a rectangular grid are discretized via a staircase approximation; hence, if the problems caused by this staircase approximation are disregarded, FDM-based FWI may fail due to the presence of undesirable wavefields. To resolve this problem, this study develops a 2D frequency-domain acoustic FWI technique using a 9-point FDM-based modelling scheme that includes an embedded boundary method (EBM). This study suggests a workflow for the whole EBM-based FWI process from the calculation of coefficients for the EBM-based 9-point FDM modelling to applying it to FWI for proper velocity updates. In numerical examples, using velocity models with a tilted surface and an arbitrarily fluctuating surface, we synthesize seismic data and verify the accuracy of EBM-based 9-point FDM modelling and its superiority over the conventional FDM by comparing it with wavefields derived from the spectral element method. Then, we show that our EBM-based FWI is able to estimate subsurface velocity distributions even though the model has irregular topography, which spoils the result of the conventional FWI.