Two-dimensional near-surface seismic imaging with surface waves : alternative methodology for waveform inversion

High-resolution seismic imaging is essential to improve results of hydrocarbon exploration.Elastic waves propagate in the Earth as body and surface waves, the latter being the mostenergetic ones. Body waves are preferred for exploration seismic imaging while surfacewaves are usually considered to be noise. However, it has been recognised that the nearsurface can be characterised by analysing surface waves and that such result may improvethe outcome of body-wave processing. Currently, surface waves analysis leads to retrievelocal 1D property profiles.We propose a waveform-based inversion procedure to derive 2D velocity models fromsurface waves. This method consists of a misfit functional modification of classical FullWaveform Inversion and we call it windowed-Amplitude Waveform Inversion (w-AWI). Weshow that w-AWI is robust regarding the choice of initial velocity model. We apply w-AWI tosynthetic and real data obtaining encouraging near-surface imaging results