The objective of this thesis is to study two Basins of the Gulf of Guinea (GoG), namely the Dahomey and the Liberian Basins. These Basins are located in the northern part of the GoG, where oil and gas exploration has significantly increased in the last 10 years or so. We proposed geological descriptions of these two Basins. The key characteristics of the two models are the presence of channels and pinch-outs for depths of between 1 km and 2 km (these values are rescaled for our numerical purposes to 600- m and 700-m depths) and normal faults below 3 km (for our numerical purposes we use 1 km instead of 3 km). We showed that these models are consistent with the plate tectonics of the region, and the types of rocks and ages of rocks in these areas. Furthermore, we numerically generated seismic data for these two models and depth-migrated them. We then interpreted the migrated images under the assumption that the geologies are unknown. The conclusions of our interpretations are that we can see clearly the fault systems in both models. However, our results suggest that seismic interpretations of the channels and pinch-outs associated with the geology of the Dahomey and Liberian Basins will generally be difficult to identify. In these particular cases, we missed a number of channels and pinch-outs in our interpretations. The limited resolution of seismic images is the key reason for this misinterpretation.

Les expériences sismiques actives sont largement utilisées pour caractériser la structure de la subsurface. Les méthodes dites d’analyse de vitesse par migration ont pour but la détermination d’un macro-modèle de vitesse, lisse, et contrôlant la cinématique de propagation des ondes. Le modèle est estimé par des critères de cohérence d’image ou de focalisation d’image. Les images de réflectivité obtenues par les techniques de migration classiques sont cependant contaminées par des artefacts, altérant la qualité de la remise à jour du macro-modèle. Des résultats récents proposent de coupler l’inversion asymptotique, qui donne des images beaucoup plus propres en pratique, avec l’analyse de vitesse pour la version offset en profondeur. Cette approche cependant demande des capacités de calcul et de mémoire importantes et ne peut actuellement être étendue en 3D.Dans ce travail, je propose de développer le couplage entre l’analyse de vitesse et la migration plus conventionnelle par point de tir. La nouvelle approche permet de prendre en compte des modèles de vitesse complexes, comme par exemple en présence d’anomalies de vitesses plus lentes ou de réflectivités discontinues. C’est une alternative avantageuse en termes d’implémentation et de coût numérique par rapport à la version profondeur. Je propose aussi d’étendre l’analyse de vitesse par inversion au domaine des données pour les cas par point de tir. J’établis un lien entre les méthodes formulées dans les domaines données et images. Les méthodologies sont développées et analysées sur des données synthétiques 2D. / Active seismic experiments are widely used to characterize the structure of the subsurface. Migration Velocity Analysis techniques aim at recovering the background velocity model controlling the kinematics of wave propagation. The first step consists of obtaining the reflectivity images by migrating observed data in a given macro velocity model. The estimated model is then updated, assessing the quality of the background velocity model through the image coherency or focusing criteria. Classical migration techniques, however, do not provide a sufficiently accurate reflectivity image, leading to incorrect velocity updates. Recent investigations propose to couple the asymptotic inversion, which can remove migration artifacts in practice, to velocity analysis in the subsurface-offset domain for better robustness. This approach requires large memory and cannot be currently extended to 3D. In this thesis, I propose to transpose the strategy to the more conventional common-shot migration based velocity analysis. I analyze how the approach can deal with complex models, in particular with the presence of low velocity anomaly zones or discontinuous reflectivities. Additionally, it requires less memory than its counterpart in the subsurface-offset domain. I also propose to extend Inversion Velocity Analysis to the data-domain, leading to a more linearized inverse problem than classic waveform inversion. I establish formal links between data-fitting principle and image coherency criteria by comparing the new approach to other reflection-based waveform inversion techniques. The methodologies are developed and analyzed on 2D synthetic data sets.