Interval velocity analysis in the dip-angle domain

Abstract

When interval velocity analysis is conducted over complex geologic regions, scattering-angle gathers may cause significant inaccuracies. These inaccuracies are related to the loss of structural dip information when generating common-image gathers (CIGs). In this study, the idea of performing interval velocity analysis in the dip-angle domain was examined and demonstrated with synthetic and real data examples. The effects of migration velocity errors and their identification in this domain were analyzed in detail. Carrying the analysis directly on dip-angle gathers is practically impossible. The ability to perform a standard analysis based on flattening the events in the CIGs is achieved by replacing the dip-angle measure with an equivalent offset measure. This equivalent offset provides higher sensitivity to velocity errors and may improve the accuracy of the resultant velocity model.