Local events-based fast RTM surface-offset gathers via dip-guided interpolation

Abstract

AbstractReverse Time Migration (RTM) Surface Offset Gathers (SOGs) are demonstrated to deliver more superior residual dip information than ray-based approaches. It appears more powerful in complex geological settings, such as salt areas. Still, the computational cost of constructing RTM SOGs is a big challenge in applying it to 3D field data. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel method using dips of local events as a guide for RTM gather interpolation. The residual-dip information of the SOGs is created by connecting local events from depth-domain to time-domain via ray tracing. The proposed method is validated by a synthetic experiment and a field example. It mitigates the computational cost by an order of magnitude while producing comparable results as fully computed RTM SOGs.