Determination and sensitivity analysis of the seismic velocity of a shallow layer from refraction traveltimes measures

In this paper, we are interested in determining the seismic velocity of a shallow under-ground layer from refraction traveltimes measures. We present a study case taken from an experimental seismic survey. The study case is a wide-angle seismic inversion using experimental traveltimes measures and based on ray tracing technique and genetic algorithms. The hypothesis on the velocity distribution, coming from the seismic experiment, makes the computation of some seismic rays expensive in time. We propose to reduce the computations time by introducing a formulation of the inverse problem that avoids such costly rays, hence the inversion becomes feasible. Also we present a sensitivity analysis based on a singular value decomposition of the jacobian of the traveltimes with respect to velocity. We give the relationship between the traveltimes measure errors and the velocity estimation error. We discuss the advantages of this method over the classical one based on the resolution matrix.