Implementation of elastic reverse-time migration using wavefield separation in the frequency domain

Abstract

SUMMARY Considerable effort has been devoted to the migration of multicomponent data in elastic media with wavefield separation techniques being the most successful. Most of this work has been carried out in the time domain. In this paper, we formulate a multicomponent migration technique in the frequency domain. Reverse-time migration can be viewed as the zero-lag cross-correlation between virtual source and back-propagated wavefields. Cross-correlating the Helmholtz decomposed wavefields rather than directly correlating the vector displacement fields results in sharper, more interpretable images, contaminated by fewer crosstalk artefacts. The end products are separate P and S wave (and if desired, PS and SP) migration images. We test our migration algorithm on synthetic seismic data generated using the SEG/EAGE salt-dome, Overthrust and Marmousi-2 models. We correctly image the location and shape of the target zone for oil exploration using these data sets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our new migration technique provides good images even when the initial velocity model is only approximate.