The Geophysical Tomography Group was part of the
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
The Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - Université de Paris (IPGP, University of Paris; French for "Paris Institute of Earth Physics") is a French governmental, non-profit research and higher education establishment located in Paris, dedica ...
(
Jussieu Campus
The Jussieu Campus (''Campus Universitaire de Jussieu'') is a higher education campus located in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the main campus of the Faculty of Science of Sorbonne University. Paris-VII University (now merged ...
). During the years 1985-2000 it made developments in the domain of nonlinear fitting of seismic waveforms. The work of the group has been described as pioneering.
History
By the year 1985, the imaging methods used by the oil industry were based in signal-processing concepts, and it seemed that modern methods, based on careful waveform modeling and waveform fitting optimization were desirable. The team tried to make real-life demonstrations that the methods of inverse theory could be applied to the imaging problem typical of seismic exploration. The GTG was founded by
Albert Tarantola, who authored an influential paper on the inversion of seismic reflection data.
[A. Tarantola]
Inversion of seismic reflection data in the acoustic approximation
J. Geophysics 49, 1259 (1984). The GTG published work on fully nonlinear waveform fitting is possible on seismic exploration data, using elastic modeling and gradient-based optimization techniques (''adjoint methods'').
The group's work in
Monte Carlo method
Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determi ...
for waveform fitting is being integrated in present-day developments.
References
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Research institutes in France
Geophysical imaging