• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.102-107
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• 2006

Recently, rapid developments in computer hardware have enabled reverse-time migration to be applied to various production imaging problems. As a wave-equation technique using the two-way wave equation, reverse-time migration can handle not only multi-path arrivals but also steep dips and overturned reflections. However, reverse-time migration causes unwanted artefacts, which arise from the two-way characteristics of the hyperbolic wave equation. Zero-lag cross correlation with diving waves, head waves and back-scattered waves result in spurious artefacts. These strong artefacts have the common feature that the correlating forward and backward wavefields propagate in almost the opposite direction to each other at each correlation point. This is because the ray paths of the forward and backward wavefields are almost identical. In this paper, we present several tactics to avoid artefacts in shot-domain reverse-time migration. Simple muting of a shot gather before migration, or wavefront migration which performs correlation only within a time window following first arriving travel times, are useful in suppressing artefacts. Calculating the wave propagation direction from the Poynting vector gives rise to a new imaging condition, which can eliminate strong artefacts and can produce common image gathers in the reflection angle domain.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.739-744
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• 1996

'Kite' is a newly developed single-channel seismic imaging system capable of producing high resolution three dimensional images of subbottom geology in one traverse of a survey region. The system consists of a horizontally towed hydrophone array and active source. The hydrophone array is towed axis perpendicular to ship direction and the airgun source at the end of the hydrophone array is excited at timed intervals during the progression. The construction of the three dimensional subbottom image was made simply by using conventional multichannel seismic reflection data processing techniques. Common source shot (CSS) gathers of the hydrophone traces are evaluated using Dix's equation for average interval velocity of each subbottom layer. From the interval velocity profile and the normal consolidation stress condition, values of shear modulus, porosity, and shear velocity are deduced from the chosen values of physical constants. The system has been successfully tested at several locations on the North Atlantic continental shelf.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.225-238
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• 2019

Migration velocity analysis (MVA) for creating optimum depth-domain velocities in seismic imaging was applied to marine long-offset multi-channel data, and the effectiveness of the MVA approach was demonstrated by the combinations of conventional data processing procedures. The time-domain images generated by conventional time-processing scheme has been considered to be sufficient so far for the seismic stratigraphic interpretation. However, when the purpose of the seismic imaging moves to the hydrocarbon exploration, especially in the geologic modeling of the oil and gas play or lead area, drilling prognosis, in-place hydrocarbon volume estimation, the seismic images should be converted into depth domain or depth processing should be applied in the processing phase. CMP-based velocity analysis, which is mainly based on several approximations in the data domain, inherently contains errors and thus has high uncertainties. On the other hand, the MVA provides efficient and somewhat real-scale (in depth) images even if there are no logging data available. In this study, marine long-offset multi-channel seismic data were optimally processed in time domain to establish the most qualified dataset for the usage of the iterative MVA. Then, the depth-domain velocity profile was updated several times and the final velocity-in-depth was used for generating depth images (CRP gather and stack) and compared with the images obtained from the velocity-in-time. From the results, we were able to confirm the depth-domain results are more reasonable than the time-domain results. The spurious local minima, which can be occurred during the implementation of full waveform inversion, can be reduced when the result of MVA is used as an initial velocity model.