CONCLUSIONS

In previous reports I have presented a method to analyze prestack migrated data that can be used in a structural-velocity optimization. The method relies on a structural interpretation of the migrated image, and does not require picking of prestack migrated data. In this report I have shown an example of salt data, the type of data that I intend to apply my method to. Several conclusions can be drawn from the results presented here. First, a structural analysis is necessary to geologically constrain the velocity model. Salt regions have complex structure, and automated velocity-estimation methods often fail without the help of interactive interpretation of the inversion results. Second, even though migrating the data with a 2-dimensional velocity model reduces the effects of lateral velocity variation on the data, the residual moveout in the data can be complicated. Therefore, local effects in the residual moveout curves have to be taken into account in the velocity estimation to determine correctly the structural model.