Reverse time migration via frequency-adaptive multiscale spatial grids

Abstract

Reverse time migration (RTM) is widely used because of its ability to recover complex geologic structures. However, RTM also has a drawback in that it requires significant computational cost. In RTM, wave modeling accounts for the largest part of the computing cost for calculating forward- and backward-propagated wavefields before applying an imaging condition. For this reason, we have applied a frequency-adaptive multiscale spatial grid to enhance the efficiency of the wave simulations. To implement wave modeling for different values of the spatial grid interval, we apply a model reduction technique, the generalized multiscale finite-element method (GMsFEM), which solves local spectral problems on a fine grid to simulate wave propagation on a coarser grid. We can enhance the speed of computation without sacrificing accuracy by using coarser grids for lower frequency waves, while applying a finer grid for higher frequency waves. In the proposed method, we can control the size of the coarse grid and level of heterogeneity of the wave solutions to tune the trade-off between speedup and accuracy. As we increase the expected level of complexity of the wave solutions, the GMsFEM wave modeling can capture more detailed features of waves. After computing the forward and backward wavefield on the coarse grid, we reproject the coarse wave solutions to the fine grid to construct the RTM gradient image. Although wave solutions are computed on a coarse grid, we still obtain the RTM images without reducing the image resolution by projecting coarse wave solutions to the fine grid. We determine the efficiency of the proposed imaging method using the Marmousi-2 model. We compare the RTM images using GMsFEM with a fixed coarse mesh and a multiple frequency-adaptive coarse meshes to indicate the image quality and computational speed of the new approach.