Effective Elliptic Models for Efficient Wavefield Extrapolation in Anisotropic Media

Wavefield extrapolation operator for elliptically anisotropic media offers significant cost reduction compared to that of transversely isotropic media (TI), especially when the medium exhibits tilt in the symmetry axis (TTI). However, elliptical anisotropy does not provide accurate focusing for TI media. Therefore, we develop effective elliptically anisotropic models that correctly capture the kinematic behavior of the TTI wavefield. Specifically, we use an iterative elliptically anisotropic eikonal solver that provides the accurate traveltimes for a TI model. The resultant coefficients of the elliptical eikonal provide the effective models. These effective models allow us to use the cheaper wavefield extrapolation operator for elliptic media to obtain approximate wavefield solutions for TTI media. Despite the fact that the effective elliptic models are obtained by kinematic matching using high-frequency asymptotic, the resulting wavefield contains most of the critical wavefield components, including the frequency dependency and caustics, if present, with reasonable accuracy. The methodology developed here offers a much better cost versus accuracy tradeoff for wavefield computations in TTI media, considering the cost prohibitive nature of the problem. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach on the BP TTI model.