Tomographic joint inversion of first arrivals in a real case from Saudi Arabia

A joint inversion of both first and refracted arrivals is applied on a seismic line, acquired onshore, in order to obtain a well-resolved velocity field for the computation of static corrections. The use of different arrivals in the inversion involves exploiting the information derived from the different raypaths associated with each wave type, thus enhancing the reliability of the inversion. The data was gathered by Saudi Aramco in an area of the Arabian Peninsula characterized by strong lateral variations, both in topography and shallow velocity, and where therefore a well-defined near-surface velocity field is important. In addition to velocity, the depth distribution of the quality factor Q is computed from the tomographic inversion of the seismic-signal frequency shift. Thus, the Q-factor field is used to perform an inverse Q-data filtering and improve the resolution of the final stacked section.