Limitations

The methodologies described in this Chapter have several fundamental limitations. Most importantly, they require an accurate forward modeling operator: both the physics of wave propagation and the true earth velocity must be accurately modeled. While the physics of wave-propagation is well-understood, earth velocity models are never completely true-to-life.

Another important caveat is that the wave-equation methods outlined here require the data and models to be represented on a regular grid. While we can choose our model-space, prestack seismic data is never recorded on a perfectly regular grid. Before we can apply the techniques described here, we need to regularize the data. Chemingui (1999) and Fomel (2000) provide two ways of achieving this goal.