Two dimensional dynamically focused beam migration in weakly anisotropic media

Abstract

Anisotropy exists widely in the earth medium. For anisotropic medium, the traditional isotropic migration will lead to the inaccurate images and unfocused energy. Especially for a deep target exploration, ignoring anisotropy will further affect the subsequent seismic data interpretation. As an improved ray method, Gaussian beam migration overcomes the imaging problems of caustics and shadow zones in Kirchhoff migration, and avoids the time-consuming problems of wave equation migrations. However, the imaging quality of the Gaussian beam migration is controlled by the initial beam width at the surface. In this paper, we extend Nowack (2011)’s algorithm to anisotropic media and present an anisotropic dynamically focused beam migration by modifying the propagator of the Gaussian beams. We use anisotropic kinematic and dynamic ray tracing with optimized coefficients to obtain travel times, trajectories and dynamic information. We then use dynamically focused beams for weakly anisotropic media to calculate the Green's function and the Claerbout imaging condition to obtain images. This strategy enables us to improve the imaging quality in the middle and deep layers without reducing the imaging quality in the shallow layers, which will help to overcome the limitation of the initial beam width in Gaussian beam migration. The results for a VTI fault model and the Shengli complex structure model show the accuracy and validity of the proposed method in this paper.