Anisotropic Born scattering for the qP scalar wavefield using a low-rank symbol approximation

Abstract

We have developed a procedure to derive low-rank evolution operators in the mixed space-wavenumber domain for modeling the qP Born-scattered wavefield at perturbations of an anisotropic medium under the pseudoacoustic approximation. To approximate the full wavefield, this scattered field is then added to the reference wavefield obtained with the corresponding low-rank evolution operator in the background medium. Being built upon a Hamiltonian formulation using the dispersion relation for qP-waves, this procedure avoids pseudo-S-wave artifacts and provides a unified approach for linearizing anisotropic pseudoacoustic evolution operators. Therefore, it is immediately applicable to any arbitrary class of anisotropy. As an additional asset, the scattering operators explicitly contain the sensitivity kernels of the Born-scattered wavefield with respect to the anisotropic medium parameters. This enables direct access to important information such as its offset dependence or directional characteristics as a function of the individual parameter perturbations. For our numerical tests, we specify the operators for a mildly anisotropic tilted transversely isotropic (TTI) medium. We validate our implementation in a simple model with weak contrasts and simulate reflection data in the BP TTI model to indicate that the procedure works in a more realistic scenario. The Born-scattering results indicate that our procedure is applicable to strongly heterogeneous anisotropic media. Moreover, we use the analytical capabilities of the kernels by means of sensitivity tests to demonstrate that using two different medium parameterizations leads to different results. The mathematical formulation of the method is such that it allows for an immediate application to least-squares migration in pseudoacoustic anisotropic media.