Poststack migration deconvolution

Abstract

Reflectivity images of the earth are calculated by migrating discrete grids of seismic traces. Typically, such traces are spatially undersampled on a recording grid with limited aperture width and so give rise to migration noise sometimes referred to as the acquisition footprint. For poststack migration images, we show how to partly deconvolve the acquisition footprint by applying a deblurring filter to the migration section, where the filter is the approximate inverse to the migration Green’s function. Results with synthetic and field data show that post‐stack migration deconvolution can noticeably improve the spatial resolution of migration images, decrease the strength of migration artifacts, and improve the quality of the migration image. We conclude that migration deconvolution can be a viable alternative to some of the other postmigration processing procedures based on statistics and ad hoc parameter choices.