Founded in 1983, the Center for Wave Phenomena collaborates with the petroleum industry, government agencies and academic institutions to conduct leading research in seismic exploration, monitoring and wave propagation. Originally founded by applied mathematicians, CWP combines mathematical rigor and computational sophistication with realistic representation of subsurface formations. While generally focused on the task of subsurface imaging for exploration and production of hydrocarbons, the Center for Wave Phenomena is a culturally diverse group of people, with a diverse set of research interests. This diversity strengthens our research program. It ensures that our students and visitors experience both the freedom to choose research problems that suit them best and the responsibility to choose problems that are relevant to our sponsors. Financial support from and collaboration with those many sponsors makes this experience possible.
CWP is unparalleled in the breadth of its research program and has been instrumental in developing the foundation for such key seismic technologies as wave-equation-based imagery and tomography, inversion and processing for anisotropic media, and seismic interferometry. The range of topics in the current CWP research portfolio includes elastic wavefield imaging and tomography, 3D acoustic/elastic wave propagation, novel acquisition methods using robotics and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), quantification of uncertainty in seismic inversion, seismic interferometry, and Marchenko imaging, anisotropic processing and 3D elastic inversion of microseismic data, waveform inversion for transversely isotropic and orthorhombic media, and anisotropic wave-equation velocity analysis. The consortium actively works on large-scale cluster and GPU computing.
