Target oriented illumination analysis using wave equation

Abstract

This paper presents a target oriented methodology to perform illumination studies considering several different acquisition geometries. The Green's function, used to evaluate the illumination amplitude for specific subsurface points, was estimated using the complete two‐way wave equation solved by Finite Difference Method. The proposed methodology requires considerably less resources, in terms of processing time and disk space, than the traditional procedure using wave equation. The traditional procedure compares depth images obtained by a migration scheme, after modeling the complete dataset for a certain acquisition geometry. Both methodologies are more accurate than the results based on ray tracing modeling in complex areas (due to the high frequency approximations involved in this scheme). Numerical results are presented and analyzed on a modified 2D version of the SEG/EAGE Salt Dome. This model was especially selected because in order to get good depth image results — underneath salt bodies with complex geometries — the first necessary condition is to have an appropriately acquired dataset, and the illumination analysis is the first step in this direction.