The Geophysical Tomography Group was part of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris

The Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris is a French governmental, non-profit research and higher education establishment located in Paris, dedicated to the study of earth and planetary sciences by combining observations, laboratory analysis and construction of conceptual analogical and...

 (Jussieu Campus

Jussieu Campus

The Jussieu Campus is a higher education campus located in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France, which is the main campus of the Pierre and Marie Curie University ....

). 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 made 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

Albert Tarantola

Albert Tarantola was a Spanish-born physicist , of the University of Paris , and author of the book probabilistic formulation of inverse problems...

, who authored an influential paper on the inversion of seismic reflection data. 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 method

Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used in computer simulations of physical and mathematical systems...

for waveform fitting is being integrated in present-day developments.