Inversion of seismic attributes for velocity and attenuation structure

We have developed an inversion formulation for velocity and attenuation structure using seismic attributes, including envelope amplitude, instantaneous frequency and arrival times of selected seismic phases. We refer to this approach as AFT inversion for amplitude, (instantaneous) frequency and time. Complex trace analysis is used to extract the different seismic attributes. The instantaneous frequency data are converted to t* using a matching procedure that approximately removes the effects of the source spectra. To invert for structure, ray-perturbation methods are used to compute the sensitivity of the seismic attributes to variations in the model. An iterative inversion procedure is then performed from smooth to less smooth models that progressively incorporates the shorter-wavelength components of the model. To illustrate the method, seismic attributes are extracted from seismic-refraction data of the Ouachita PASSCAL experiment and used to invert for shallow crustal velocity and attenuation structure. Although amplitude da ta are sensitive to model roughness, the inverted velocity and attenuation models were required by the data to maintain a relatively smooth character. The amplitude and t* data were needed, along with the traveltimes, a t each step of the inversion in order to fit all the seismic attributes at the final iteration.