Plane-wave least-squares reverse-time migration

Wei Dai, Gerard T. Schuster

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

253 Scopus citations

Abstract

A plane-wave least-squares reverse-time migration (LSRTM) is formulated with a new parameterization, where the migration image of each shot gather is updated separately and an ensemble of prestack images is produced along with common image gathers. The merits of plane-wave prestack LSRTM are the following: (1) plane-wave prestack LSRTM can sometimes offer stable convergence even when the migration velocity has bulk errors of up to 5%; (2) to significantly reduce computation cost, linear phase-shift encoding is applied to hundreds of shot gathers to produce dozens of plane waves. Unlike phase-shift encoding with random time shifts applied to each shot gather, plane-wave encoding can be effectively applied to data with a marine streamer geometry. (3) Plane-wave prestack LSRTM can provide higher-quality images than standard reverse-time migration. Numerical tests on the Marmousi2 model and a marine field data set are performed to illustrate the benefits of plane-wave LSRTM. Empirical results show that LSRTM in the plane-wave domain, compared to standard reversetime migration, produces images efficiently with fewer artifacts and better spatial resolution. Moreover, the prestack image ensemble accommodates more unknowns to makes it more robust than conventional least-squares migration in the presence of migration velocity errors. © 2013 Society of Exploration Geophysicists.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)S165-S177
Number of pages1
JournalGeophysics
Volume78
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 3 2013

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01
Acknowledgements: We thank the sponsors of CSIM consortium (http://csim.kaust.edu.sa) for their financial support. We are also grateful to the supercomputing lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for their computer facilities and technical support. The comments from Tamas Nemeth, John Etgen, and three anonymous reviewers have greatly improved the quality of the paper.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Geochemistry and Petrology
  • Geophysics

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