The absence of low-frequency information in seismic data is one of the most difficult problems in elastic full waveform inversion. Without low-frequency data, it is difficult to recover the long-wavelength components of subsurface models and the inversion converges to local minima. To solve this problem, the elastic envelope inversion method is introduced. Based on the elastic envelope operator that is capable of retrieving low- frequency signals hidden in multicomponent data, the proposed method uses the envelope of multicomponent seismic signals to construct a misfit function and then recover the long- wavelength components of the subsurface model. Numerical tests verify that the elastic envelope method reduces the inversion nonlinearity and provides better starting models for the subsequent conventional elastic full waveform inversion and elastic depth migration, even when low frequencies are missing in multicomponent data and the starting model is far from the true model. Numerical tests also suggest that the proposed method is more effective in reconstructing the long-wavelength components of the S-wave velocity model. The inversion of synthetic data based on the Marmousi-2 model shows that the resolution of conventional elastic full waveform inversion improves after using the starting model obtained using the elastic envelope method. Finally, the limitations of the elastic envelope inversion method are discussed.
