Elastic 3D PS converted-wave Gaussian beam migration

Abstract

Elastic-wave migration is a desirable technique because it can image the structure of the earth more accurately. We develop a new elastic Gaussian beam migration method with 3D three component (3D-3C) seismic data that focuses on a complex PS-converted wave. Based on the elastic-wave equations and complete boundary conditions, we derive effective work formulas for an accurate multimode wave downward continuation for the free-space, ocean-bottom, and free-surface models. We separate the PS-wave into linear-polarized P-S1 and P-S2 waves to simplify the expression and derivation of the migration. To image the vectorial wave directly and solve the reverse-polarity issue, we use the crosscorrelations of P-wave divergence and PS-wave curl operators as the 3D P- and PS-imaging conditions, and we develop a unit vector to define the rotation direction of the PS-wave. With our approach, 3D-3C multimode waves are automatically decomposed to P- and PS-waves during the migration without the need for prior data separation, which not only reduces the crosstalk noise caused by inaccurate multimode wave decomposition but also decreases the processing cost. Applications of this method to two 3D-3C synthetic examples indicate successful PS-wave migration. Also, confirming that the PS-image can be constructed by summing the P-S1 and P-S2 images and is independent of the choice of the ray-centered local coordinates validates this method.