Options for source wavefield reconstruction in prestack reverse-time migration

Nguyen, B. and McMechan, G.A., 2009. Options for source wavefield reconstruction in prestack reverse-time migration. Journal of Seismic Exploration, 18: 305-314. One of the main steps in prestack reverse-time migration is recovery of the source wavefield at each time step during the reverse-time extrapolation of the receiver wavefield. This recovery can be accomplished in a number of ways, each of which has it’s advantages, disadvantages, and computational and data storage requirements. Two types of source wavefield recovery exist. The most common (and the most expensive) approach to source wavefield recovery is computing and saving the wavefield snapshots and accessing them in reverse-time order; the most economical approaches involve reconstruction of the source wavefield, at each time step, from boundary or initial conditions (or a combination of these). The advantages of reconstruction are most obvious in 3D, where the disk storage requirement is reduced by at least two orders of magnitude compared to saving all the time snapshots.
- Chang, W. and McMechan, G.A., 1986. Reverse-time migration of offset vertical seismic profilingdata using the excitation-time imaging condition. Geophysics, 51: 67-84.
- Chattopadhyay, S. and McMechan, G.A., 2008. Imaging conditions for prestack reverse-timemigration. Geophysics, 73: S81-S89.de Faria, E., 1986. Migracao antes do empilhamento utilizando propagacaoreversa no tempo. M.Sc. Thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.
- Fricke, J.R., 1988. Reverse-time migration in parallel: a tutorial. Geophysics, 53: 1143-1150.
- Gray, S.H., Etgen, J., Dellinger, J. and Whitmore, D., 2001. Seismic migration problems andsolutions. Geophysics, 66: 1622-1640.
- Loewenthal, D. and Hu, L.Z. 1991. Two methods for computing the imaging condition forcommon-shot prestack migration. Geophysics, 56: 378-381.
- McMechan, G.A., 1983. Migration by extrapolation of time-dependent boundary values. Geophys.Prosp., 31: 413-420.
- McMechan, G.A., 1989. A review of seismic acoustic imaging by reverse-time migration. Internat.J. Imaging Syst. Technol., 1: 18-21.
- Sun, R. and McMechan, G.A., 1986. Pre-stack reverse-time migration for elastic waves withapplication to synthetic offset vertical seismic profiles. Proc. IEEE, 74: 457-465.
- Whitmore, N.D. and Lines, L.R., 1986. Vertical seismic profiling depth migration of a salt domeflank. Geophysics, 51: 1087-1109.
- Xu, T., McMechan, G.A. and Sun, R., 1995. 3-D prestack full-wavefield inversion. Geophysics,60: 1805-1818.
- Yoon, K., Marfurt, K.J. and Starr, W., 2004. Challenges in reverse-time migration. Expanded
- Abstr., 74th Ann. Internat. SEG Mtg., Denver: 1057-1060.
- Zhang, Y., Sun, J. and Gray, S., 2007. Reverse-time migration: amplitude and implementationissues. Expanded Abstr., 77th Ann. Internat. SEG Mtg., San Antonio: 2145-2149.