EGU23-8767, updated on 31 Aug 2023

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-8767
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Can Normalizing Flows make Uncertainty Quantification Practical

for Time-Lapse Seismic Monitoring
Changxiao Sun1,2,3, Alison Malcolm2, and Rajiv Kumar4
1
Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China
(sunchangxiao@apm.ac.cn)
2
Department of Earth Sciences, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada (amalcolm@mun.ca)
3
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
4
Schlumberger (rajmittal09@gmail.com)

Due to the nonlinearity of inversion as well as the noise in the data, seismic inversion results
certainly have uncertainties. Whether quantifying these uncertainties is useful depends at least in
part on the computational cost of computing them. Bayesian techniques dominate uncertainty
quantification for seismic inversion. The goal of these methods is to estimate the probability
distribution of the model parameters given the observed data. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo
algorithm is widely employed for approximating the posterior distribution. However, generating
the posterior samples by combining the prior and the likelihood is intractable for large problems
and challenging for smaller problems. We apply a machine learning method called normalizing
flows, which consists of a series of invertible and differentiable transformations, as an alternative
to the sampling-based methods. In our work, the normalizing flows method is combined with full
waveform inversion(FWI) using a numerically exact local solver to quantify the uncertainty of time-
lapse changes. We integrate uncertainty quantification(UQ) and FWI by estimating UQ on the
images generated by FWI making it computationally practical. In this way, a reasonable posterior
probability distribution is directly predicted and produced by transforming from a normal
distribution, measuring the amount and spread of variation in FWI images by sample mean and
standard deviation. In our numerical results, the method for calculating the posterior distribution
of the model is verified to be practical and advantageous in terms of effectiveness.

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