Superwide-angle one-way wave propagator and its application in imaging steep salt flanks

Abstract

One-way wave propagators have been used extensively in forward and inverse problems. The advantages of one-way wave propagators are the fast speed of computation and the large savings in computer resources. However, regular one-way wave propagators have inherent angle limitation to within 90° of the preferred direction (e.g., [Formula: see text]-direction). We propose to overcome the limitation by a superwide-angle one-way method, which combines and interpolates two orthogonally propagated one-way wavefields in the 2D case. A weight function determined by the propagation angle is employed to combine the two one-way wavefields. In the current implementation, we use the wavefield gradient to estimate the propagation angle. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method has accurate superwide-angle [Formula: see text] propagation and can model turning waves well. By applying the superwide-angle one-way wave propagator on several synthetic model data sets, we can demonstrate the validity of the method in imaging steep and overhanging salt flanks.