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Consider the geometric inverse problem: there is a set of delta-sources in spacetime that emit waves travelling at unit speed. If we know all the arrival times at the boundary cylinder of the spacetime, can we reconstruct the space, a Riemannian manifold with boundary? With a finite set of sources we can only hope to get an approximate reconstruction, and we indeed provide a discrete metric approximation to the manifold with explicit data-driven error bounds when the manifold is simple. This is the geometrization of a seismological inverse problem where we measure the arrival times on the surface of waves from an unknown number of unknown interior microseismic events at unknown times. The closeness of two metric spaces with a marked boundary is measured by a labeled Gromov–Hausdorff distance. If measurements are done for infinite time and spatially dense sources, our construction produces the true Riemannian manifold and the finite-time approximations converge to it in the metric sense

 

SUMMARY Dynamic ray tracing is a robust and efficient method for computation of amplitude and phase attributes of the high-frequency Green’s function. A formulation of dynamic ray tracing in Cartesian coordinates was recently extended to higher orders. Extrapolation of traveltime and geometrical spreading was demonstrated to yield significantly higher accuracy—for isotropic as well as anisotropic heterogeneous 3-D models of an elastic medium. This is of value in mapping, modelling and imaging, where kernel operations are based on extrapolation or interpolation of Green’s function attributes to densely sampled 3-D grids. We introduce higher-order dynamic ray tracing in ray-centred coordinates, which has certain advantages: (1) such coordinates fit naturally with wave propagation; (2) they lead to a reduction of the number of ordinary differential equations; (3) the initial conditions are simple and intuitive and (4) numerical errors due to redundancies are less likely to influence the computation of the Green’s function attributes. In a 3-D numerical example, we demonstrate that paraxial extrapolation based on higher-order dynamic ray tracing in ray-centred coordinates yields results highly consistent with those obtained using Cartesian coordinates. Furthermore, in a 2-D example we show that interpolation of dynamic ray tracing quantities along a wavefront can be done with much better consistency in ray-centred coordinates than in Cartesian coordinates. In both examples we measure consistency by means of constraints on the dynamic ray tracing quantities in the 3-D position space and in the 6-D phase space. 

SUMMARY Within the field of seismic modelling in anisotropic media, dynamic ray tracing is a powerful technique for computation of amplitude and phase properties of the high-frequency Green’s function. Dynamic ray tracing is based on solving a system of Hamilton–Jacobi perturbation equations, which may be expressed in different 3-D coordinate systems. We consider two particular coordinate systems; a Cartesian coordinate system with a fixed origin and a curvilinear ray-centred coordinate system associated with a reference ray. For each system we form the corresponding 6-D phase spaces, which encapsulate six degrees of freedom in the variation of position and momentum. The formulation of (conventional) dynamic ray tracing in ray-centred coordinates is based on specific knowledge of the first-order transformation between Cartesian and ray-centred phase-space perturbations. Such transformation can also be used for defining initial conditions for dynamic ray tracing in Cartesian coordinates and for obtaining the coefficients involved in two-point traveltime extrapolation. As a step towards extending dynamic ray tracing in ray-centred coordinates to higher orders we establish detailed information about the higher-order properties of the transformation between the Cartesian and ray-centred phase-space perturbations. By numerical examples, we (1) visualize the validity limits of the ray-centred coordinate system, (2) demonstrate the transformation of higher-order derivatives of traveltime from Cartesian to ray-centred coordinates and (3) address the stability of function value and derivatives of volumetric parameters in a higher-order representation of the subsurface model.