Inverse NMO stack operator combines the conventional NMO and stacking operation into a single step. The performance of inverse NMO stack is similar to the cascaded NMO+stack. Due to the characteristic of the discrete implementation of geophyiscal operators, the interpolation procedure is unavoidable. Therefore, the geophyiscal adjoint and implementation adjoint are coupled, although they are essentially different in meaning.
The inverse NMO stack operator is based on hyperbolic moveout relation. Therefore, it can be used to remove nonhyperbolic events and random noise. The algorithm is very efficient. But since the operator does not take amplitude into consideration, it cannot handle the AVO effects correctly. The application of this approach is largely confined by this limitation.