Quantifying changes of subsurface geophysical properties using double-difference seismic-waveform inversion

Quantifying time-lapse changes of subsurface geophysical properties is crucial for many applications, such as monitoring geologic carbon storage, enhanced geothermal system reservoirs, and conventional and unconventional oil/gas reservoirs. We develop novel double-difference seismic-waveform inversion methods using energy-weighted preconditioner, a priori information, and a modified total-variation regularization scheme for accurate estimation of changes of subsurface geophysical properties. The methods jointly invert time-lapse seismic data for changes of geophysical properties in target- monitoring regions. We employ an alternating minimization method to decouple our new waveform inversion with the modified total-variation regularization into two minimization subproblems to improve the robustness of waveform inversion. Our new double-difference waveform inversion algorithms not only preserve sharp interfaces of the target-monitoring regions, but also reduce inversion artifacts outside the target-monitoring regions. We use both synthetic and real time-lapse seismic data to validate the improvement of our new joint inversion methods. Our numerical results show that our new double-difference seismic-waveform inversion significantly improves the accuracy of time-lapse seismic data inversion compared with conventional inversion.