AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026340157
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ARTICLE

Full-azimuth reflection tomography and full-waveform inversion for Permian igneous rock velocity characterization in the Tarim Basin

Peng Qi1,2 ,  Yu Sun3 ,  Zhangqing Sun1* ,  Songlin Yang4 ,  Jun Ning5 ,  Bin Hu1 ,  Fangchao Yan3 ,  Fengfan Huyan6 ,  Mingchen Liu1 ,  Jiashun Yao2
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1 State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth Exploration and Imaging, College of GeoExploration Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, Jilin , China
2 Sinopec Geophysical Research Institute, Nanjing, Jiangsu , China
3 CNNC Geological Exploration Group Co., Ltd., Beijing , China
4 Research Institute of Exploration and Development, Liaohe Oilfield Branch Company, PetroChina, Panjin, Liaoning , China
5 Geologic Party No. 243, China National Nuclear Corporation, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia , China
6 Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, University College London, London , United Kingdom
Received: 21 August 2026 | Revised: 4 September 2026 | Accepted: 7 September 2026 | Published online: 23 September 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

In Northwest China, igneous rocks are widely developed within the Permian strata. Their high velocities and rapid lateral variations degrade the imaging of the underlying strata, producing structural distortions and weakened reflections that can be misinterpreted as faults or low-relief structures. Moreover, conventional model building struggles to recover their velocity field. To address this challenge, we present a two-step velocity-model-building workflow that combines offset vector tile (OVT) domain reflection tomography with full-waveform inversion (FWI) to characterize the Permian igneous rocks. In the first step, after five-dimensional data regularization and OVT sorting, full-azimuth OVT-domain reflection tomography was used to build the velocity model, constraining lateral velocity variations in the igneous interval that conventional offset-domain tomography leaves unconstrained. This yields an initial model accurate enough for the subsequent inversion. In the second step, FWI with an edge-preserving total-variation regularization was applied. The regularization retains the blocky boundaries of the igneous body in place of structure-oriented smoothing, and the inversion successfully characterizes the velocity structure of the Permian igneous rocks. The effectiveness of the inversion is demonstrated by comparisons of common-image-point gathers, well velocities, and pre-stack depth migration images. The workflow provides a practicable route to velocity modeling and imaging in land igneous-rock settings.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Full-waveform inversion
Offset vector tile
Reflection tomography
Velocity model building
Igneous rocks
Tarim Basin
Funding
This work was supported by the Deep Earth Probe and Mineral Resources Exploration National Science and Technology Major Project (2025ZD1006800), the China National Nuclear Corporation Uranium Industry’s “Open Competition Mechanism” Technology Research Project (No.202302), the China National Petroleum Corporation Liaohe Oilfield Branch Entrusts Technical Service Project (LHYT-KTKFYJY-2024-JS-6439), and the National Key R&D Program of China under Grants 2023YFC2906700 and IGCP-675.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing