Imaging subsurface objects by seismic P-wave tomography: numerical and experimental validations
Abstract
We tackle the problem of characterizing the subsurface, more specifically detecting shallow buried objects, using seismic techniques. This problem is commonly encountered in civil engineering when cavities or pipes have to be identified from the surface in urban areas. Our strategy consists of processing not only first arrivals, but also later ones, and using them both in tomography and migration processes, sequentially. These two steps, which form the basis of seismic imaging, can be carried out separately provided that the incident and diffracted wavefields are separated in the data space. Tomography is implemented here as an iterative technique for reconstructing the background velocity field from the first‐arrival traveltimes. The later signals are then migrated by a Kirchhoff method implemented in the space domain. To study the reliability of this methodology, it is first applied to synthetic cases in the acoustic and elastic approximation. Both the background velocity field and the local impedance contrasts are reconstructed as defined in the predicted model. An experimental case, specifically designed for the purpose, is then considered in order to test the algorithms under real conditions. The resulting image coincides well with the predicted model when only P‐waves are generated. In the elastic mode, surface waves make P‐wave extraction difficult, so that the reconstruction remains incomplete. This is confirmed by the real data example. Finally, we demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed method under such circumstances, provided that suitable preprocessing of data is carried out, in particular, the removal of surface waves.