3D isotropic elastic reverse time migration using signed magnitudes of elastic data components

Wang, W. and McMechan, G.A., 2019. 3D isotropic elastic reverse time migration using signed magnitudes of elastic data components. Journal of Seismic Exploration, 28: 221-244. Elastic reverse time migration (ERTM) is capable of characterizing subsurface properties more completely than its acoustic counterpart. P- and S-waves coexist in elastic wavefields, and their separation is required before, or as part of, applying the image conditions. Traditional P- and S-wave separation methods based on divergence and curl operators don't preserve the elastic vector information, and the associated polarity reversals of S-wave images are difficult to handle. Thus a preferable workflow for isotropic ERTM should include a vector decomposition of the elastic wavefields and a vector-based image condition that directly uses the signed magnitudes of the decomposed vector wavefields to produce PP and PS images. We propose a new 3D elastic image condition which is a source-normalized crosscorrelation of the signed magnitudes of the decomposed wavefields. The image condition is robust and stable for generating 3D PP and PS images and their corresponding angle domain common-image gathers (ADCIGs) with incident angles calculated from Poynting vectors. Comparisons between the proposed image condition and a vector-based dot-product image condition and show that the proposed image condition generates PP ADCIGs with a wider range of incident angles than existing dot-product image conditions.
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