PS-wave polarity reversal in angle domain common-image gathers

Daniel Rosales and James Rickett

daniel@sep.stanford.edu, james@sep.stanford.edu

ABSTRACT

The change in the reflection polarity at normal incidence is a fundamental feature of converted-wave seismology due to the vector nature of the displacement field. The conventional way of dealing with this feature is to reverse the polarity of data recorded at negative offsets. However, this approach fails in presence of complex geology. To solve this problem we propose operating the polarity flip in the angle domain. We show that this method correctly handle the polarity reversal after prestack migration for arbitrarily complex earth models.