Viscoacoustic generalized screen propagator in constant-Q model

When seismic waves propagate through the geological formation,there is a significant loss of energy and a decrease in imaging resolution,because of the viscoacoustic properties of subsurface medium.This profoundly impacts seismic wavefield propagation,imaging and interpretation.To accurately image the true structure of subsurface medium,the consensus among geophysicists is to no longer treat subsurface medium as ideal homogeneous medium,but rather to incorporate the viscoacoustic properties of subsurface medium.Based on the generalized screen propagator using conventional acoustic wave equation(acoustic GSP),our developed method introduces viscoacoustic compensation strategy,and derives a one-way wave generalized screen propagator based on time-fractional viscoacoustic wave equation(viscoacoustic GSP).In numerical experiments,we conducted tests on two-dimensional multi-layer model and the Marmousi model.When comparing with the acoustic GSP using the acoustic data,we found that the imaging results of the viscoacoustic GSP using the viscoacoustic data showed a significant attenuation compensation effect,and achieved imaging results for both algorithms were essentially consistent.However,the imaging results of acoustic GSP using viscoacoustic data showed significant attenuation effects,especially for deep subsurface imaging.This indicates that we have proposed an effective method to compensate the attenuated seismic wavefield.Our application on a set of real seismic data demonstrated that the imaging performance of our proposed method in local areas surpassed that of the conventional acoustic GSP.This suggests that our proposed method holds practical value and can more accurately image real subsurface structures while enhancing imaging resolution compared with the conventional acoustic GSP.Finally,with respect to computational efficiency,we gathered statistics on running time to compare our proposed method with conventional Q-RTM,and it is evident that our method exhibits higher computational efficiency.In summary,our proposed viscoacoustic GSP method takes into account the true properties of the medium,still achieves migration results comparable to conventional acoustic GSP.

Two exact first-order k-space formulations for low-rank viscoacoustic wave propagation on staggered grids

Wave propagation in the viscoacoustic media is physically dispersive and dissipated.Completely excluding the numerical dispersion error from the physical dispersion in the viscoacoustic wave simu-lation is indispensable to understanding the intrinsic property of the wave propagation in attenuated media for the petroleum exploration geophysics.In recent years,a viscoacoustic wave equation char-acterized by fractional Laplacian gains wide attention in geophysical community.However,the first-order form of the viscoacoustic wave equation,often solved by the conventional staggered-grid pseu-dospectral method,suffers from the numerical dispersion error in time due to the low-order finite-difference approximation.It is challenging to completely eliminate the error because the viscoacoustic wave equation contains two temporal derivatives,which stem from the time stepping and the amplitude attenuation terms,respectively.To tackle the issue,we derive two exact first-order k-space viscoacoustic formulations that can fully exclude the numerical error from the physical dispersion.For the homoge-neous case,two formulations agree with the viscoacoustic analytical solution very well and have the same efficiency.For the heterogeneous case,our second k-space formulation is more efficient than the first one because the second formulation significantly reduces the number of the wavenumber-space mixed-domain operators,which are the expensive part of the viscoacoustic k-space simulation.Nu-merical cases validate that the two first-order k-space formulations are effective and efficient alternatives to the current staggered-grid pseudospectral formulation for the viscoacoustic wave simulation.

Hybrid absorbing boundary condition based on transmitting boundary and its application in 3D fractional viscoacoustic modeling

An accurate numerical simulation for wave equations is essential for understanding of wave propagation in the earth's interior as well as full waveform inversion and reverse time migration. However, due to computational cost and hardware capability limitations, numerical simulations are often performed within a finite domain. Thus, an adequate absorbing boundary condition (ABC) is indispensable for obtaining accurate numerical simulation results. In this study, we develop a hybrid ABC based on a transmitting boundary, which is referred to as THABC, to eliminate artificial boundary reflections in 3D second-order fractional viscoacoustic numerical simulations. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive weighted coefficient to reconcile the transmitting and viscoacoustic wavefields in THABC. Through several numerical examples, we determine that the proposed THABC approach is characterized by the following benefits. First, with the same number of absorbing layers, THABC exhibits a better ability in eliminating boundary reflection than traditional ABC schemes. Second, THABC is more effective in computation, since it only requires the wavefields at the current and last time steps to solve the transmitting formula within the absorbing layers. Benefiting from a simple but effective combination between the transmitting equation and the second-order wave equation, our scheme performs well in the 3D fractional Laplacian viscoacoustic numerical simulation.

Viscoacoustic prestack reverse time migration based onthe optimal time-space domain high-order finite-difference method

Prestack reverse time migration （RTM） is an accurate imaging method ofsubsurface media. The viscoacoustic prestack RTM is of practical significance because itconsiders the viscosity of the subsurface media. One of the steps of RTM is solving thewave equation and extrapolating the wave field forward and backward; therefore, solvingaccurately and efficiently the wave equation affects the imaging results and the efficiencyof RTM. In this study, we use the optimal time-space domain dispersion high-order finite-difference （FD） method to solve the viscoacoustic wave equation. Dispersion analysis andnumerical simulations show that the optimal time-space domain FD method is more accurateand suppresses the numerical dispersion. We use hybrid absorbing boundary conditions tohandle the boundary reflection. We also use source-normalized cross-correlation imagingconditions for migration and apply Laplace filtering to remove the low-frequency noise.Numerical modeling suggests that the viscoacoustic wave equation RTM has higher imagingresolution than the acoustic wave equation RTM when the viscosity of the subsurface isconsidered. In addition, for the wave field extrapolation, we use the adaptive variable-lengthFD operator to calculate the spatial derivatives and improve the computational efficiencywithout compromising the accuracy of the numerical solution.

The stability problem of reverse time migration for viscoacoustic VTI media

In real strata anisotropy and viscosity extensively exists. They degraded waveforms in amplitude, resulting in which reducing of image resolution. To obtain high-precision imaging of deep reservoirs, we extended the separated viscous and anisotropic reverse time migration （RTM） to a stable viscoacoustic anisotropic RTM for vertical transverse isotropic （VTI） media, based on single generalized standard and linear solid （GSLS） media theory.. We used a pseudo-spectral method to develop the numerical simulation. By introducing a regularization operator to eliminate the high-frequency instability problem, we built a stable inverse propagator and achieved viscoacoustic VTI media RTM. High-resolution imaging results were obtained after correcting for the effects of anisotropy and viscosity. Synthetic tests verify the validity and accuracy of algorithm.