Wavefield extrapolation in laterally-varying tilted TI media

Guojian Shan and Biondo Biondi

shan@sep.stanford.edu, biondo@sep.stanford.edu

ABSTRACT

A new wavefield extrapolation method has been developed that allows the propagation of waves in an anisotropic medium. The anisotropic medium considered here is transversely isotropic (TI) with an axis of symmetry. Our method applies an asymmetric explicit correction filter after the normal isotropic extrapolation operator. It is stable and suitable for laterally varying TI media. This new scheme is useful to extrapolate wavefields in a vertical transversely isotropic (VTI) medium in tilted coordinates. The explicit correction operator, designed by a weighted least-square method, is stable and accurate for the desired wavenumbers. Impulse responses from this scheme and the anisotropic phase-shift method are compared to illustrate the algorithm.