A normalized wavefield separation cross-correlation imaging condition for reverse time migration based on Poynting vector

Prestack reverse time migration（PSTM） is a common imaging method; however low-frequency noises reduce the structural imaging precision. Thus, the suppression of migration noises must be considered. The generation mechanism of low-frequency noises is analyzed and the up-, down-, left-, and right-going waves are separated using the Poynting vector of the acoustic wave equation. The computational complexity and memory capacitance of the proposed method are far smaller than that required when using the conventional separation algorithm of 2D Fourier transform. The normalized wavefield separation crosscorrelation imaging condition is used to suppress low-frequency noises in reverse time migration and improve the imaging precision. Numerical experiments using the Marmousi model are performed and the results show that the up-, down-, left-, and right-going waves are well separated in the continuation of the wavefield using the Poynting vector. We compared the imaging results with the conventional method, Laplacian filtering, and wavefield separation with the 2D Fourier transform. The comparison shows that the migration noises are well suppressed using the normalized wavefield separation cross-correlation imaging condition and higher precision imaging results are obtained.

True-amplitude wavefield separation using staggered-grid interpolation in the wavenumber domain

Wavefield separation of multicomponent seismic data to image subsurface structures can be realized in either the space domain or the wavenumber domain. However, as the particle velocity components used in the wavenumber-domain wavefield separation are not defined at the same grid point with the staggered-grid finite-difference method for elastic wavefield simulation, we propose the wavenumber-domain interpolation method to estimate the required values at the common grid points prior to the wavenumber-domain true-amplitude wavefield separation. Moreover, numerical experiments show that the wavenumber-domain interpolation method has high interpolation accuracy and the trueamplitude wavefield separation method shows good amplitude preservation. The application of the proposed methodology to elastic reverse-time migration can obtain good amplitudepreserved images even in the case of some velocity error.

Separation of P. and SV-wavefields from multi-componen seismic data

In multi-component seismic exploration, the horizontal and vertical components both contain P- and SV-waves. The P- and SV-wavefields in a seismic record can be separated by their horizontal and vertical displacements when upgoing P- and SV-waves arrive at the sea floor. If the sea floor P wave velocity, S wave velocity, and density are known, the separation can be achieved in ther-p domain. The separated wavefields are then transformed to the time domain. A method of separating P- and SV-wavefields is presented in this paper and used to effectively separate P- and SV-wavefields in synthetic and real data. The application to real data shows that this method is feasible and effective. It also can be used for free surface data.

An improved fast converted-wave imaging method

The conventional fast converted-wave imaging method directly uses backward Pand converted S-wavefield to produce joint images. However, this image is accompanied by strong background noises, because the wavefi elds in all propagation directions contribute to it. Given this issue, we improve the conventional imaging method in the two aspects. First, the amplitude-preserved P-and S-wavef ield are obtained by using an improved space-domain wavef ield separation scheme to decouple the original elastic wavef ield. Second, a convertedwave imaging condition is constructed based on the directional-wavefield separation and only the wavefields propagating in the same directions used for cross-correlation imaging, resulting in effectively eliminating the imaging artifacts of the wavefields with different directions;Complex-wavefi eld extrapolation is adopted to decompose the decoupled P-and S-wavefield into directional-wavefields during backward propagation, this improves the eff iciency of the directional-wavef ield separation. Experiments on synthetic data show that the improved method generates more accurate converted-wave images than the conventional one. Moreover, the improved method has application potential in micro-seismic and passive-source exploration due to its source-independent characteristic.

Separating and imaging diffractions in dip domain on the basis of slope analysis

Fracture-cave reservoirs in carbonate rocks are characterized by a large difference in fracture and cavity size,and a sharp variation in lithology and velocity,thereby resulting in complex diffraction responses.Some small-scale fractures and caves cause weak diffraction energy and would be obscured by the continuous reflection layer in the imaging section,thereby making them difficult to identify.This paper develops a diffraction wave imaging method in the dip domain,which can improve the resolution of small-scale diffractors in the imaging section.Common imaging gathers(CIGs)in the dip domain are extracted by Gaussian beam migration.In accordance with the geometric differences of the diffraction being quasilinear and the reflection being quasiparabolic in the dip-domain CIGs,we use slope analysis technique to filter waves and use Hanning window function to improve the diffraction wave separation level.The diffraction dip-domain CIGs are stacked horizontally to obtain diffraction imaging results.Wavefield separation analysis and numerical modeling results show that the slope analysis method,together with Hanning window filtering,can better suppress noise to obtain the diffraction dip-domain CIGs,thereby improving the clarity of the diffractors in the diffraction imaging section.