Local small-scale heterogeneities, like geological inhomogeneities, surface topographies and cavities are known to affect seismic wavefield gradients such as strains and rotations. This effect is in fact measurable with current instruments. For example, the agreement between data and synthetics computed in a tomographic model is often not as good for rotation as it is for displacement. In my work, we discuss the implications of this effect on performing a full waveform inversion with rotation data, and compare the results with full waveform inversion performed with displacement data.