Skeletonized wave-equation inversion in vertical symmetry axis media without too much math

We present a tutorial for skeletonized inversion of pseudo-acoustic anisotropic VTI data. We first invert for the anisotropic models using wave equation traveltime inversion. Here, the skeletonized data are the traveltimes of transmitted and/or reflected arrivals that lead to simpler misfit functions and more robust convergence compared to full waveform inversion. This provides a good starting model for waveform inversion. The effectiveness of this procedure is illustrated with synthetic data examples and a marine data set recorded in the Gulf of Mexico