Seismic Survey Design Using Full Wavefield Inversion

A method for evaluating seismic survey acquisition geometries, said acquisition geometries specifying source and receiver locations, said method comprising:

• proposing two or more different acquisition geometries to evaluate;
• assuming a subsurface reference model of velocity or other physical property, simulating, using a computer, synthetic measured seismic data corresponding to all source and receiver locations in the two or more acquisition geometries;
• for each selected acquisition geometry,
• selecting from the synthetic measured seismic data those data corresponding to the source and receiver locations present in the selected acquisition geometry, and inverting the selected synthetic measured data by iterative, numerical inversion, using the computer, to obtain a final updated subsurface model;
• and
• comparing the final updated model for each proposed acquisition geometry to the reference model using a selected quantitative measure of agreement with the reference model, then selecting an acquisition geometry by balancing a high quantitative measure of agreement with a low survey cost.