Multicomponent prestack depth migration by scalar wavefield extrapolation

Abstract

We present a new multicomponent prestack depth migration methodology based on successive application of conventional scalar wave equation migration. We do not separate the data into PP‐ and PS‐waves; rather, we migrate each x‐, y‐, and z‐component of the data using both P and S propagation velocities, followed by polarization filtering in the depth domain. By generating intermediate images in the depth domain, we can account for polarity reversals of the PS reflection for all dips. Since the polarization angles are calculated from the data, it is straightforward to accommodate anisotropic effects (quasi‐P and quasi‐S) into multicomponent migration.The multicomponent migration results in our synthetic examples demonstrate that even for a single shot gather, we can obtain clean PP‐ and PS‐wave images over complex structures and resolve the problem of PS‐wave polarity reversals.