Extended Diffraction Tomography

We present the development of extended diffraction tomography, a new approach to the solution of the linear seismic waveform inversion problem. This method has several appealing features, such as the use of arbitrary depth-dependent reference models and the decomposition of the full 2D or 3D inverse problem into a large number of independent 1D problems. This decomposition makes the method naturally highly parallelizable. Careful implementation yields significant robustness with respect to noise. Several synthetic examples are shown which characterize the benefits of our method and demonstrate the usefulness of choosing realistic 1D reference media.