Target-oriented wavefield tomography: A field data example

Target-oriented wavefield tomography: A field data example

Yaxun Tang and Biondo Biondi

Abstract:

We present a strategy for efficient migration velocity analysis in complex geological settings. The proposed strategy contains two main steps: simulating a new data set using an initial unfocused image and performing wavefield-based tomography using this data. We show that the new data set can be synthesized for a specific target region where velocities are inaccurate. We also show that the new data set can be much smaller than the original one due to the target-oriented modeling strategy, but it contains necessary velocity information for successful velocity analysis. These interesting features make this new data set suitable for target-oriented, fast and interactive velocity modeling building. We demonstrate the performance of our method on a selected 2-D line of a 3-D data set acquired from the Gulf of Mexico, where we update the subsalt velocity in a target-oriented fashion and obtain a subsalt image with improved continuities and signal to noise ratio.

Target-oriented wavefield tomography: A field data example