Refraction travel-time tomography based on adjoint state techniques
Résumé
Standard refraction traveltime tomography based on ray tracing techniques has difficulties to handle large datasets that come from current seismic acquisition surveys. To overcome this problem we suggest a refraction tomography method based on adjoint state techniques to derive the gradient of the traveltime misfit function. We use the eikonal equation for the forward modelling, and iterate with a conjugate gradient method. Synthetic examples demonstrate the efficiency and the great potential of the method for 3D applications of refraction tomography.