Double plane wave reverse time migration with plane wave Green's function

Abstract:

Reverse time migration (RTM) is effective in obtaining complex subsurface structures from seismic data. By solving the two-way wave equation, RTM can use entire wavefield for imaging. Although powerful computer are becoming available, the conventional pre-stack shot gather RTM is still computationally expensive. Solving forward and backward wavefield propagation for each source location and shot gather is extremely time consuming, especially for large seismic datasets. We present an efficient, accurate and flexible plane wave RTM in the frequency domain where we utilize a compressed plane wave dataset, known as the double plane wave (DPW) dataset. Provided with densely sampled seismic dataset, shot gathers can be decomposed into source and receiver plane wave components with minimal artifacts. The DPW RTM is derived under the Born approximation and utilizes frequency domain plane wave Green’s function for imaging. Time dips in the shot profiles can help to estimate the range of plane wave components present in shot gathers. Therefore, a limited number of plane wave Green’s functions are needed for imaging. Plane wave Green’s functions can be used for imaging both source and receiver plane waves. Source and receiver reciprocity can be used for imaging plane wave components at no cost and save half of the computation time. As a result, the computational burden for migration is substantially reduced. Plane wave components can be migrated independently to recover specific targets with given dips, and ray parameter common image gathers (CIGs) can be generated after migration directly. The ray parameter CIGs can be used to justify the correctness of velocity models. Subsurface anisotropy effects can also be included in our imaging condition, provided with plane wave Green’s functions in the anisotropic media.