Lost in the endless valleys and hills of the full-waveform inversion (FWI) misfit functional, we tend to stop and wonder: Are we heading in the right direction? Are we in the right valley? Or within a bigger context, is FWI the way to go? The practice of updating an Earth model and generating synthetic data from it that we can compare to the field data is an appealing concept. If the two data sets (the modeled and field) match, using some measure of misfit, we might have found a good Earth model. This process depends on our ability to fully replicate (simulate) the physics of wave propagation inside the Earth. In principle, our field data carry information from every point in the Earth, but these data are also constrained by the geometry of seismic acquisition.

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