Short Note Matching dips in velocity estimation

Accurate velocity estimation is essential to obtain a good migrated image and accurate resevoir attributes (Claerbout, 1999). The problem is that tomographic velocity estimation is an underdetermined problem. We can reduce the null space of the tomographic process by adding additional constraints, or more accurate goals, to the estimation. In early work (Clapp et al., 1997; Clapp and Biondi, 1999; Clapp, 2001b,a) I discussed one such constraint: encouraging velocity follows dip. Often we have an added constraint; although we may be unsure of reflector position (due to anisotropy, etc.) or we may have a good estimate of reflector dip (either from well logs, geologic models, etc). By incorporating this information into the inversion we can better constrain the inversion process. This method is tested on a fairly complicated synthetic dataset.