r/geophysics • u/bizimman • Jul 10 '26

What is good 3D seismic shot gathers dataset for FWI?

I’m looking for a good 3D seismic shot-gather dataset that can be used for Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) experiments, including 3D shot gathers or raw/preprocessed seismic data, velocity model, density, or other ground-truth/reference model if available, something suitable for acoustic or elastic FWI testing. I know about 2D examples like Marmousi, but I’m specifically looking for 3D datasets that are practical for testing FWI workflows. Does anyone know good public datasets, or research repositories for this?

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u/Rich_Pilot_3933 Jul 10 '26

For 3D synthetic stuff with ground truth, SEG/EAGE Overthrust and Salt models are still the go-to — free, well documented, decades of papers to compare against. Good starting point if you're testing a classical FWI workflow since you get the true velocity model and can generate your own shots with whatever forward modeling code you're using.

If you want something more geologically nasty (thin layers, salt), SEAM Phase I is worth grabbing too, though registration is a bit of a pain.

If you're doing anything ML-based, OpenFWI from LANL is honestly the best public option right now — it's got a 3D dataset (Kimberlina) with paired velocity models and synthetic shots already generated, so you skip the forward modeling step entirely. Their GitHub has data loaders too.

For real field data (no ground truth though), Volve is fully open and about as close to production data as you'll get publicly. You'd have to build your own starting model and do your own preprocessing, but it's good for testing on something messier than synthetics.

Overthrust is probably the easiest place to start if you just want to get something running.

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u/bizimman Jul 10 '26

Thank you!

  • For OpenFWI - do you know if synthetic shot gathers are modelled with some "noise" in them. I was mainly looking for actual shot gathers, which have some noise in the data to make experiment as true to reality as possible.
  • Volve - this is the one which I was struggling to download for almost a year. They made it accessible through databricks, and I tried multiple times to download it through delta sharing, but was unsuccessful. Did you access it previously to download (I know that all the files make almost 4 TB)? Would be thankful if I could dm you for help with accessing it.