Introduction

The fundamental concepts presented in Biondi (2005a) of quantitatively relating perturbations in anisotropic parameters to the corresponding reflector movements in angle-domain common-image gathers (ADCIGs) have been applied to flat reflectors. It showed on real data how measuring the residual moveout (RMO) in ADCIGs provides the quantitative information necessary to update the velocity function in a migration velocity analysis (MVA) procedure.

Aiming to generalize that methodology to the most general case, we derive an analytical analysis of residual moveout in anisotropic ADCIGs with dipping reflectors.

After deriving the kinematic analysis in the general case, we apply the general methodology to the particular case of residual moveout analysis of reflections from dipping reflectors in a vertical transverse isotropic (VTI) medium. Synthetic examples demonstrate the accuracy of the RMO curves predicted by our kinematic analysis. Furthermore, given the inaccuracy of the RMO curves predicted when assuming that the reflectors are flat, synthetic examples also demonstrate the usefulness of the generalization we present.