INVERSION METHOD IN THE SLANT STACK DOMAIN USING AMPLITUDES OF REFLECTION ARRIVALS*

Abstract

AbstractAlmost all ray‐tracing methods ignore the analysis of the amplitudes of seismic arrivals and therefore utilize only half of the available information. We propose a method which is a combination of ray‐tracing imaging and transformation of the amplitudes of wide‐aperture data.Seismic data in the conventional X‐T domain are first transformed to the domain of intercept time τ and ray parameter p to recover the plane wave response. The next step is the derivation of a series of plane wave reflection coefficients, which are mapped as a function of τ and p. The reflection coefficients R(τ, p) for two arbitrarily chosen traces can then be used in our inversion method to derive a slowness‐depth and a density‐depth profile. It is shown that the inclusion of amplitudes of seismic arrivals (in this method, we consider the acoustic case) makes the inverse method highly stable and accurate. In a horizontally stratified medium one can recover separate profiles of velocity and density. Since this method utilizes large‐offset data, it can be used for separate recovery of velocity and density to a greater depth.