Two-dimensional PP/PS-stereotomography: P- and S-waves velocities estimation from OBC data

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1 Geophys. J. Int. (2007) 170, doi: /j X x Two-dimensional PP/PS-stereotomography: P- and S-waves velocities estimation from OBC data M. Alerini, 1,2 G. Lambaré, 1,3 R. Baina, 4 P. Podvin 1 and S. Le Bégat 1,5 1 École des Mines de Paris, Fontainebleau, France 2 Now at SINTEF Petroleum Research, Trondheim, Norway 3 Now at Compagnie Générale de Géophysique, Massy, France 4 OPERA, Pau, France 5 Now at Geophysical Consulting, Pau, France Accepted 2007 March 9. Received 2007 March 9; in original form 2006 February 14 1 INTRODUCTION Stereotomography has been proposed and developed by Billette & Lambaré (1998). It belongs to the family of slope tomography methods (Riabinkin 1957; Sword 1987), where the velocity macromodel is estimated from locally coherent events characterized by their slopes in the pre-stack data cube. Picking such events is much easier than picking globally coherent events as in standard traveltime reflection tomography (Bishop et al. 1985; Farra & Madariaga 1988). Moreover local kinematic information required by stereotomography can easily be obtained from globally coherent events (while the reverse is generally not possible!), or from most of the types of kinematic information: stacking velocities, CRS attributes (Lavaud et al. 2004), curvature of Common Image Gathers (CIGs) as in Chauris et al. (2002a,b), Nguyen et al. (2002), etc. After several years of use (Billette et al. 2003; Lambaré et al. 2004a), stereotomography appears as a very practical and flexible tool for velocity macromodel estimation. If the use of locally coherent events is very helpful in the case of surface seismic marine surveys, it can be also a great advantage in the context of ocean bottom cable (OBC) surveys. This type of acquisition has been developed in the nineties (Caldwell 1999), and consists of a cable containing four-component (4C) receivers laid on the seabed, while a vessel pulls a source at the sea surface. S waves SUMMARY We present the extension of stereotomography to P- and S-wave velocity estimation from PP- and PS-reflected/diffracted waves. In this new context, we greatly benefit from the use of locally coherent events by stereotomography. In particular, when applied to S-wave velocity estimation from PS-data, no pairing of PP- and PS-events is a priori required. In our procedure the P-wave velocity model is obtained first using stereotomography on PP-arrivals. Then the S-wave velocity model is obtained using PS-stereotomography on PS-arrivals fixing the P- wave velocity model. We present an application to an ideal synthetic data set demonstrating the relevance of the approach, which allows us to recover depth consistent P- and S-waves velocity models even if no pairing of PP- and PS-events is introduced. Finally, results to a real data set from the Gulf of Mexico are presented demonstrating the potential of the method in a noisy data context. Key words: P waves, reflection seismology, seismic velocities, S waves, tomography, traveltime. are recorded through P-to-S conversions on the reflector/diffractors and can be used advantageously in some contexts for improving structural imaging (Thomsen et al. 1997) or reservoir characterization (Zhang et al. 2003; Veire & Landrø 2003). Processing of converted waves however requires an adaptation of the seismic processing sequence (Stewart et al. 2002, 2003; Boëlle & Ricarte 2003). Concerning the velocity macromodel, the estimation of depth consistent P- and S-wave velocity models requires the identification of some key reflectors among the PP- and PS-arrivals. This pairing is fastidious and can be extremely difficult in regions with a poor signal-to-noise ratio (Stopin 2001; Broto et al. 2003; Foss et al. 2005). Here we present a method for estimating consistent P- and S-wave velocity models without any pairing of PP- and PS-events. The approach is based on stereotomography and is called PP/PSstereotomography. We limit ourselves to the isotropic case (even if it is well known that anisotropy can be an important phenomenum for converted waves (Stopin 2001; Foss et al. 2005), with the difficult problem of the depth consistency of P- and S-wave velocity models). In this paper, we present PP/PS-stereotomography, and demonstrate with an application to an ideal synthetic example the ability of the method to recover depth consistent P- and S-wave velocity models from PP- and PS-data. Finally, we present an application of the method to a real data set. GJI Seismology C 2007 The Authors 725

2 726 M. Alerini et al. Figure 1. Common shot (left) and common receiver gather (right) corresponding to central trace (s, r) = (5., 3.8) km. For this central trace a locally coherent event can be described by its two-way traveltime T sr and its slopes p s and p r. 2 PP/PS-STEREOTOMOGRAPHY 2.1 Principles PP/PS-stereotomography, as slope tomography methods (Riabinkin 1957; Sword 1986, 1987; Billette & Lambaré 1998), is based on the concept of locally coherent events (Lambaré 2002). A locally coherent event has to be tracked only over a limited number of traces centred around a central trace (Fig. 1). For velocity estimation it can be characterized by the position of the central trace (s, r), by its central two-way traveltime, T sr, and by its local slopes in the common shot and common receiver gathers (p s, p r ). The basis of slope tomography methods is that a locally coherent event defined by these quantities provides information on the velocity reference model independently of the other locally coherent events. Compared to former existing slope tomography methods, the specificity of stereotomography is that the parameters describing the pairs of ray segments associated to each picked event are optimized jointly with the velocity model. In the PP/PS-stereotomography method, the data set consists of a set of picked events, { } d = (s, r, p s, p r, T sr ) N PP i=1, (s, r, p s, p r, T sr ) N PS j=1, (1) meaning a set of N = N PP + N PS locally coherent events, which have to be identified as N PP PP and N PS PS primary reflected/diffracted events. The model has to be slightly modified compared to standard stereotomography. Indeed, we deal with two velocity models, C P and C S, respectively, for the P- and S-wave velocity models. We have thus the model, { } m = (X,β s,β r,t s,t r ) N PP i=1, (X,β s,β r,t s,t r ) N PS j=0, (C P) M P k=1, (C S) M S l=1, (2) where (C P ) M P k=1 and (C S) M S l=1 denote, respectively, the M P and M S parameters describing the P- and S-wave reference velocity models. We use cubic cardinal B-splines (de Boor 1978) and C j denotes the weight of the jth B-spline. The part (X,β s,β r, T s, T r ), (3) represents a pair of ray segments with X the position of the diffraction/reflection point, (β s, β r ) the shooting angles and (T s,t r ) the one-way traveltimes, for the rays propagating from X towards the source and towards the receiver, respectively. For PS-ray segments, the ray segment towards the source is computed in the P-wave velocity model, while the ray segment towards the receiver is computed in the S-wave velocity model (Fig. 2). Note that no interface is Figure 2. Stereotomographic model in PS-stereotomography: pair of ray segments and velocity models. The pair of ray segments is defined by position of the primary diffraction/reflection point, X, by the shooting angles (β s, β r ), and the one-way traveltimes (T s, T r ), for the rays from X towards the source and towards the receiver, respectively. The ray segment towards the source is computed in the P-wave reference velocity model C P, while the ray segment towards the receiver is computed in the S-wave reference velocity model C S. During the PS-stereotomographic optimization C P is fixed but both the ray segments parameters and the S-wave reference velocity model are optimized.

3 2-D PP/PS-stereotomography 727 required in the velocity model and that the inversion does not require any pairing of PP- and PS-events. A joint inversion of both velocity models could have been considered, but for simplicity and stability we investigate here the following optimization scheme: (i) PP-stereotomography for the P-wave reference velocity model using PP-data; (ii) PS-stereotomography for the S-wave reference velocity model using PS-data, and fixing the PP-stereotomographic model to the previously obtained one. 2.2 Data and picking Our strategy for picking is to perform first an initial automatic picking (like the one described in Billette et al. 2003) and then some selection steps among the picks (Lambaré et al. 2004b). By now stereotomography works in most cases as a semi-automatic process. However, even if it is easier than in standard traveltime tomography, the picking remains a serious bottleneck for practical applications of the method. When doing the picking we assume that we are able to identify PP- and PS-events. Usually, we assume that, due to the low S-wave velocity in the shallow part of the model, there is a natural separation leading to recording the PP waves on the vertical component and the PS waves on the horizontal components. Better approaches exist as, for example, the one proposed by Edme et al. (2005). Note that picking does not require a horizontal sea bottom approximation: without introducing any new unknown we can estimate the slope at receiver by p r = xr T dx r dr, (4) where x r denotes the position vector for the receiver and r denotes some abscissa along the receiver line. 2.3 Optimization and regularization The optimization of the model (2) is performed through the minimization of an l 2 -norm cost function, C(m), composed of the square misfits of the calculated and observed data and of some regularization terms C(m) = 1 ( dcalc (m) d obs 2 + ε 2 Lm 2). (5) 2 The minimization of this cost function is done using a local optimization, based on the LSQR algorithm, which is a conjugated gradient scheme adapted to huge sparse matrices (Paige & Saunders 1982a,b). The necessary Fréchet derivatives are estimated with the help of paraxial ray theory (Billette & Lambaré 1998). Practically, the stereotomographic optimization involves three steps: initialization, relocalization and joint inversion (Billette et al. 2003). The minimization of expression (5) is an ill-conditioned problem and a careful tuning of the regularization terms has to be introduced for insuring the success of the inversion. Indeed, it is an important point for stereotomography, since the description of the velocity model is not directly connected to the density of the picked events as it is in standard traveltime tomography (Farra & Madariaga 1988). In the inverse problem theory the regularization is related to a priori information (Tarantola 1987). However, here, it is essentially introduced for insuring the convergence of the non-linear optimization to a reasonable solution. We suggest in this paper, an automatic way for tuning the regularization parameters. Figure 3. Synthetic experiment: models. From top to bottom, P-, S-wave velocity, density and distribution of associated perturbations. Units of velocity models are in m s 1 and units of density are kg m 3. A first regularization appears when using the LSQR scheme: this one is similar to the effects of a truncated SVD. For the associated tuning parameters, we refer to the recommendation of Paige & Saunders (1982a), which is based on the numerical accuracy of the computer. This was proposed and applied successfully to 3-D stereotomography (Chalard et al. 2000). However, Scales et al. (1990) and Ory & Pratt (1995) have shown the limitation of this first kind of regularization, and for this reason we also use a Tikhonov regularization (Kilmer & O Leary 2001) for the velocity part of the stereotomographic model (eq. 5). In this expression we choose the regularization operator, L, to lead to a Laplacian-like regularization (Billette et al. 2003), the difficulty now being the choice of the weight ε. Various methods have been proposed for this choice (Pratt & Chapman 1992; Kilmer & O Leary 2001), and we have choosen the

4 728 M. Alerini et al. Figure 4. Synthetic experiment: common shot sections s = 3000 m. (left) PP-data, (right) PS-data. The red line shows the limit of the applied mute. one proposed by Wang (1993). It consists in balancing the weight of the regularization with the weight of the stereotomographical part of the cost function. Considering eq. (5), it leads to Tr(G ε bal = t G) Tr(L t L), (6) where Tr and t denote, respectively, the trace and the transpose of the matrix, and where G = d/ m, are the Fréchet derivatives of the stereotomographic problem. In an empirical way, Wang (1993) proposes ε = 0.1 ε bal. (7) The great advantage of the choice of Wang is that it can be easily automated. However, for the first non-linear iteration, where we are far from the solution, we use ε = ε bal or even ε = 10 ε bal in order to converge safely to the solution. 3 APPLICATION TO A SYNTHETIC DATA SET We now present a numerical study to demonstrate the approach. We want to show that in a good synthetic data set it is possible to invert a P- and an S-wave velocity model in an automatic process, without introducing any pairing of the PP- and PS-events. Figure 5. Synthetic experiment: S-waves velocity model obtained by inversion with the true P-waves velocity field. To be compared to the exact velocity model (Fig. 6). The dipbars are superimposed.

5 2-D PP/PS-stereotomography 729 Figure 6. Synthetic experiment: exact S-wave reference velocity model and dipbars corresponding to PS-events. 3.1 Model description The data are computed using the 2.5-D elastic ray + Born approximation, which insures that only primary reflection/diffraction are considered and allows for a perfect separation of PP- and PSarrivals. Using such a modelling algorithm avoids the difficult preprocessing of converted waves and we can study the proposed method in optimal conditions. We built a set of models (P-, S-waves velocity model and density model) from the MARMOUSI model (Versteeg & Grau 1991). The 4 m sampling of MARMOUSI being not sufficient for S-waves Born modelling, we resized the model with a 2 m sampling and duplicated it laterally. We finally added horizontal layers at the top and bottom of the structure in order to keep the global thickness of the model and to reduce the aliasing of the PS-ray + Born modelling operator in the upper layers. This model is then split into a reference one for the ray tracing and a perturbation one leading to the reflection/diffraction. For the reference model, the model is smoothed using a Gaussian filter with a radius of 300 m (Operto et al. 2003). These smooth models and associated perturbations are presented in Fig. 3. The reference models are described by a 2-D cardinal cubic B-Splines (de Boor 1978). Sources and receivers are spaced by 25 m, which corresponds to a standard acquisition. Ray + Born modelling computes separately PP- and PScontributions. Practically, we only consider the vertical component for the PP-events and the horizontal one for the PS-events. This corresponds to the usual assumption of a natural wavefield separation due to the low S-wave velocity layers just below the sea bottom. PP and PS data for a shot point located at 3000 m are presented in Fig Sensitivity tests For the stereotomographic picking we used an automatic picking tool (Lambaré et al. 2004a). Before this picking, we pre-processed the data: we applied an automatic gain control (AGC) and internal and external mutes to avoid the numerical artefacts of the ray + Born modelled data (non causal source, truncation enhanced by the AGC). After this automatic picking we kept only the most energetic and coherent events, that is, 579 PP-events and 603 PS-events. Figure 7. Synthetic experiment: comparison of PS CIGs. (Left) computed in the true S velocity model and (right) computed in the inverted S velocity model. The exact P velocity model is used Inversion of the S-wave velocity model using the true P-wave velocity In our PS-stereotomographic optimization, the P-wave velocity model is fixed. We thus first try with the exact one. We invert for an S-wave velocity model with B-spline spaced by 400 m horizontally and vertically, which is fully sufficient to describe our smooth velocity model. Stereotomographic optimization has often been used in a multiscale approach (Le Bégat et al. 2000; Billette et al. 2003). Here we prefer another strategy: indeed, we directly start from a fine

6 730 M. Alerini et al. Figure 8. Synthetic experiment: P-waves velocity model obtained by PP Stereotomography with the associated dipbars. According to the picked events, no information can be obtained below 2 km depth. B-spline grid and we use a time stripping approach. This is similar to a layer stripping approach: we progressively increase the number of stereotomographic picks according to their traveltime. We consider first 54 events at less than 1 s, then 213 events at less than 2 s, then 441 events at less than 3 s and finally 603 events at less than 4 s, corresponding to the full data set. For each subset of events, we perform five non-linear iterations and 20 for the final inversion which is stopped when the convergence is reached. After convergence, only seven events from the 603 events have a misfit outside the assumed data error bars. The final S-waves velocity model (Fig. 5) is close to the true model (Fig. 6) both for the velocity field, and for the dipbars. (Dipbars are located at the inverted reflection/diffraction points with the inverted geological dip). As a usual criterion for quality of the inverted velocity macromodel, we check the CIGs (Fig. 7). The comparison of PS CIGs in the true and inverted S-wave velocity model exhibits flat CIGs at the correct depths in regions with sufficient ray coverage Inversion of both P- and S-wave velocity models The P-wave inversion starts from an homogeneous initial velocity model at 1500 m s 1, and we follow a similar strategy as the one described previously. The B-spline nodes are spaced by 400 m horizontally and vertically. Here also the final velocity model (Fig. 8) is close to the true model (Fig. 9), at least in the zone with enough picks. As no data have been picked under 2000 m depth, no accurate information can be expected in the final P- and consequently S-waves velocity models below this limit. The comparison of the CIGs in the true and inverted model show that events are at the same depths and that the ones in the inverted model are flat (Fig. 10). As a satisfying result has been obtained from the P-waves velocity model, we expect a satisfying result on the S-waves velocity model as well. The initial S velocity is a gradient varying from 200 m s 1 at the surface to 800 m s 1 at 2400 m depth. The recovered inverted S velocity model (Fig. 11) is now also affected by the quality of the P velocity model which may be bad in the areas where no P data is available, that is, for example, deeper than 2000 m (Fig. 8). Here also, the comparison of PS-CIGs in the exact and inverted models shows that events are at the same depths and that the ones computed in the inverted models are flat (Fig. 12). Furthermore, the comparison of PP- and PS-CIGs in the inverted models (Fig. 13) shows that our migrated PP- and PS-images reasonably match each other in depth, although no pairing of PP- and PS-events has been done for the velocity optimization. Figure 9. Synthetic experiment: exact P-wave reference velocity model and dipbars corresponding to PP-events.

7 2-D PP/PS-stereotomography 731 The P-waves velocity model obtained from PP-stereotomography was only satisfactory from the surface to 1500 m depth due to a lack of picked events. The quality of the inverted S-waves velocity model is lower, but still satisfactory until 1400 m depth, corresponding to the part of the model where the P-wave velocity result is excellent. In this study, we have proposed an application of PP- and PSstereotomographic inversions showing that matching PP and PS images can be obtained with no PP- and PS-events pairing. This can be due to the accuracy of the picking, which allows for a good constraint on the velocity model. The matching is only observed in areas with dense enough picked PP- and PS-events. Figure 10. Synthetic experiment: comparison of PP CIGs (left) computed with the true velocity model and (right) with the inverted model. 3.3 Discussion Concerning the P-waves velocity model influence on the S-waves inversion result, we have to emphasize that the S-waves model inversion is not so strongly influenced by the errors introduced when estimating the P-waves velocity model: The contribution of the P-wave path to the total traveltime is considerably smaller than the S-wave part. 4 APPLICATION TO A REAL DATA SET After this first demonstration on synthetic data, we present results obtained on a 2-D real OBC line from the Gulf of Mexico, the Mahogany East West line. Numerous studies have been devoted to the processing of this data set (Kendall et al. 1998; Herrenschmidt et al. 2001; Gerea et al. 2001; Stopin & Ehinger 2001; Jin et al. 2002), and it was a very interesting opportunity for us to test PP/PSstereotomography. The application to Mahogany was our first application on a real data set, and we did not expect to solve the problem of imaging beneath the salt. More modestly our goal was to investigate the robustness of our approach in a case where no rigorous separation of PP- and PS-events has been applied to the data set and where strong correlated noises existed. In addition, some authors (Gerea et al. 2001; Stopin & Ehinger 2001) found some anisotropy which we did not take into account in our inversion scheme. In this context, we rather focused on the shallowest part of the profile where the signal to noise ratio was significantly higher, especially for the X -component section where we picked PS-events. Some pre-processing had been applied (Herrenschmidt et al. 2001) to the raw (4C) data set: first a P Z summation (Soubaras 1996; Zhu et al. 1999) and then various surface consistent statics corrections at the receivers for the horizontal component. Even if the separation of PP- and PS-events into the PZ-component and the X -component profiles was not perfect, we decided to use the PZ-component profile for PP-stereotomography and PP-migration and the X -component profile for PS-stereotomography and Figure 11. Synthetic experiment: inverted S-waves velocity model and associated dipbars. Inversion with the inverted P-waves velocity model. To be compared to the exact model (Fig. 6) and to the S-wave velocity model inverted with the exact P-wave velocity model (5). All three models are very similar in the illuminated areas.

8 732 M. Alerini et al. Figure 12. Synthetic experiment: comparison of PS CIGs (left) computed in the true model and (right) computed in the inverted model. Figure 13. Comparison of PP (left) and PS (right) CIGs computed in inverted models. PS-migration. However, this pre-processing was not sufficient for our needs. In particular, some PS-waves remains on the PZcomponent and inversely some PP-waves were still present on the X -component. This might be due to some coupling between the components of the geophones. We applied some further pre-processing for the stereotomographic picking: intern and extern mutes, AGC and frequency filtering. Those internal and external mutes ensure the localization of the picking in a convenient corridor, that is, where there is not only the highest stereotomographic information (no short offsets, which do not allow one to solve the velocity to depth ambiguity) but also where the signal to noise ratio is the best for the separation of PP/PS-events. Fig. 14 shows an example of common receiver gathers (X r = km) used for the picking. 4.1 Stereotomographic inversion The automatic picking tool provided a stereotomographic data set containing numerous spurious events. The identification and removal of those events has been done in similar ways for the PPand PS-data (although a greater care has been taken for the PS-data presenting a lower signal-to-noise ratio): after the automatic picking, we eliminated some of the outliers in terms of coherency, energy and equivalent model (Billette et al. 2003). Then, for security, we checked interactively the quality of each pick in the trace gathers. For PS-data, this was not enough and an additional selection during the inversion has been used: Outliers (events with too high misfit) could be removed. Then we ran the stereotomographic inversion using our time stripping approach P-wave velocity model The a priori model was an homogeneous velocity model with velocity 1500 m s 1. The spacing of the B-splines nodes was 500 m vertically and horizontally. For the time stripping approach, the PP-data set was split into four subsets, that is, 555 stereotomographic events with time <1 s, 2252 stereotomographic events with time <2 s, 3779 stereotomographic events with time <2.5 s and 5347 stereotomographic events with time <3 s. The a priori covariance matrix in the data space and the regularization strategy have been chosen in the same way as for the synthetic data set. The inverted P-wave velocity model is shown in Fig S-wave velocity model We started from an initial S-wave velocity model derived from the final P-wave using the empirical law given by Han et al. (1986) and a slight correction for the unconsolited shallow layers. The a priori S-wave velocity model was described by B-splines nodes spaced by 500 m laterally and by 120 m vertically in order to be able to describe better the strong velocity variations in the shallow part of the model. For the time stripping approach, the PS-data set was split into six subsets: 75 events with T sr < 1.5 s, 327 events with T sr < 2. s, 809 events with T sr < 3.s, 1487 events with T sr < 4. s, 2070 events with T sr < 5. s and 2875 events with T sr < 6. s. The final inverted V S model is shown on Fig. 16. We clearly, see that the top of the salt (between 2 and 2.5 km depth) was not particularly highlighted by the picking, which reflects a poor signalto-noise ratio at this depth.

9 2-D PP/PS-stereotomography 733 Figure 14. Mahogany experiment: common receiver gather for X r = 688, 305 km. The data have been pre-processed for the stereotomographic picking (AGC, frequency filter and mute). (Left) PZ-component and (right) X -component. 4.2 PP- and PS-migrated images comparison The quality of the inverted P- and S-wave velocity models can be assessed in term of matching of PP- and PS-migrated images. Here we focused on the shallow part (down to 2 km). On Fig. 17, we present the two migrated profiles. Some interpreted features on the PP-image are plotted on the top of both images for an easier comparison. First we can see that, even if the images exhibit similar geological structures, their frequency content and their amplitude balancing differ significantly. Indeed it is not easy to pair events, but until about a depth of 1.5 km, the reflectors and faults reasonably match. Below 1.5 km depth the matching is more difficult to assess. Some anisotropy had been reported by Stopin & Ehinger (2001) and could explain, at least to some extent, the very significant shift of the top of the salt between the PP and PS images. 3-D effects could also be advocated, but more probably we should blame the bad quality of our PS-stereotomographic data set. The quality of the PP-image (assessed in terms of focussing and depth of the geological structures) is equivalent to the one obtained by Stopin (2001) using standard traveltime tomography assuming an isotropic propagation. Figure 15. Mahogany experiment: final PP stereotomographic model. Dipbars have been superimposed on the V P velocity model expressed in km s events were used for estimating this velocity model.

10 734 M. Alerini et al. Figure 16. Mahogany experiment: final PS stereotomographic model. Dipbars associated to the pairs of PS ray segments have been superimposed to the V S velocity model given in km s 1. 5 CONCLUSION We have presented an extension of stereotomography to PSstereotomography for the estimation of P- and S-waves reference velocity models in multi component reflection seismics. We have demonstrated the efficiency of the approach in an ideal synthetic case, where without introducing any pairing of PP- and PS-events we obtained V P and V S velocity models matching in depth the PP and PS depth migrated profiles. Then, we have applied PP/PS-stereotomography to a real data set, the 2-D-4C OBC Mahogany data set. A major difficulty has been the picking in a noisy data context. From such a data set, without any pairing of the PP- and PS-events we obtained PP and PS depth migrated profiles fitting in depth reasonably well up to 1.5 km depth. Figure 17. Mahogany experiment: Comparison of PP and PS migrated images. (Top) PP image and (bottom) PS image. The red curves highlight reflectors, while orange curves highlight faults.

11 2-D PP/PS-stereotomography 735 Below the poor quality of the X -component section and probable anisotropy did not allow us to match the PP and PS images. Although some experience has to be gained on the picking and the strategies for events selection, other improvements could be done. For example, strong variations of the S-wave velocity in the shallow layers could be recovered more easily by using an adapted regularization parametrization. Furthermore, the extension of stereotomography to anisotropic velocity models will be the natural extension of this work (Barbosa et al. 2006; Nag et al. 2006). Finally if PP/PS-stereotomography does not require any pairing a priori, we could certainly improve the result (especially for anisotropy) by introducing the very practical strategy proposed by Foss et al. (2005). This approach allows us to introduce pairing information in an easy way as an additional term in the cost function without modifying the stereotomographic approach. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors thank Geco-Prakla for the Mahogany data set. They thank as well CGG and J.-L. Boëlle (Total) for the pre-processing of the data set and Emanuel Chalard for fruitful discussions. They thank as well Ian Mulvany and two anonymous reviewers for helpful review. They thank the sponsors of the DIG consortium: BP, Landmark, Norsk Hydro, SGI, Total and Western. This work was partly supported by the French Fonds de Soutien aux Hydrocarbures (French Ministry of Industry). REFERENCES Barbosa, B., Costa, J., Gomes, E. & Schleicher, Sensitivity Analysis for Stereotomography in Elliptic and Annelliptic media: 76th Ann. Internat. Mtg., Soc. Expl. Geophys., Expanded Abstracts, Billette, F. & Lambaré, G., Velocity macro-model estimation from seismic reflection data by stereotomography, Geophys. J. 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