Efficient calculation of a partial-derivative wavefield using reciprocity for seismic imaging and inversion

Abstract Linearized inversion of surface seismic data for a model of the earth's subsurface requires estimating the sensitivity of the seismic response to perturbations in the earth's subsurface. This sensitivity, or Jacobian, matrix is usually quite expensive to estimate for all but the simplest model parameterizations. We exploit the numerical structure of the finite-element method, modern sparse matrix technology, and source–receiver reciprocity to develop an algorithm that explicitly calculates the Jacobian matrix at only the cost of a forward model solution. Furthermore, we show that we can achieve improved subsurface images using only one inversion iteration through proper scaling of the image by a diagonal approximation of the Hessian matrix, as predicted by the classical Gauss-Newton method. Our method is applicable to the full suite of wave scattering problems amenable to finite-element forward modeling. We demonstrate our method through some simple 2-D synthetic examples.