Applications of seismic travel-time tomography

• Published in: Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 90; no. 2; pp. 285 - 303
• Main Authors: Bording, R. Phillip, Gersztenkorn, Adam, Lines, Larry R., Scales, John A., Treitel, Sven
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.08.1987
• Subjects: inverse theory; migration; seismic tomography; travel-time inversion; velocity analysis
• ISSN: 0956-540X; 0016-8009; 1365-246X
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-246X.1987.tb00728.x

This paper describes the application of tomography to seismic travel-time inversion. There are various implementations of travel-time tomography. In reflection tomography, sources and receivers are on the surface of the Earth and the principal seismic events are reflections from subsurface velocity discontinuities. In transmission tomography, sources and/or receivers may be buried beneath the surface and the events correspond to direct, or unreflected, arrivals; this is the analogue of medical tomography. There are also cases in which both direct as well as reflected arrivals are important, such as in Vertical Seismic Profiling. The latter is a direct application of the first two, but is not discussed in any detail here. It is also shown how the iterative use of travel-time tomography and depth migration can produce much enhanced subsurface images. Examples of both transmission tomography and reflection tomography combined with depth migration illustrate the methods.