College of Geo-Exploration Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130026, China

Spectral conjugate gradient method is an algorithm obtained by combination of spectral gradient me-thod and conjugate gradient method, which is characterized with global convergence and simplicity of spectral gradient method, and small storage of conjugate gradient method. Besides, the spectral conjugate gradient method was proved that the search direction at each iteration is a descent direction of objective function even without relying on any line search method. Spectral conjugate gradient method is applied to full waveform inversion for numerical tests on Marmousi model. The authors give a comparison on numerical results obtained by steepest descent method, conjugate gradient method and spectral conjugate gradient method, which shows that the spectral conjugate gradient method is superior to the other two methods.