CONCLUSIONS

Starting from the prestack migration equation in common midpoint and offset coordinates, I find a partial differential equation that can be used to transform prestack data to zero-offset data in a constant velocity medium. The PDE can be extended to depth variable velocity via an algorithm similar to Gazdag's phase-shift downward continuation. The synthetic results show a very good match between the actual zero-offset section and the output of the depth variable velocity MZO.

The obvious drawback is the fact that the MZO defined in this paper does an implicit summation over offset. I need to understand better this partial differential equation, so there will be more work on this subject in the next SEP report.