Seismic interferometry: Reconstructing the earth’s reflection response

Abstract

In 1968, Jon Claerbout showed that the reflection response of a 1D acoustic medium can be reconstructed by autocorrelating the transmission response. Since then, several authors have derived relationships for reconstructing Green’s functions at the surface, using crosscorrelations of (noise) recordings that were taken at the surface and that derived from subsurface sources. For acoustic media, we review relations between the reflection response and the transmission response in 3D inhomogeneous lossless media. These relations are derived from a one-way wavefield reciprocity theorem. We use modeling results to show how to reconstruct the reflection response in the presence of transient subsurface sources with distinct excitation times, as well as in the presence of simultaneously acting noise sources in the subsurface. We show that the quality of reconstructed reflections depends on the distribution of the subsurface sources. For a situation with enough subsurface sources — that is, for a distribution that illuminates the subsurface area of interest from nearly alldirections — the reconstructed reflection responses and the migrated depth image exhibit all the reflection events and the subsurface structures of interest, respectively. With only a few subsurface sources, that is, with insufficient illumination, the reconstructed reflection responses are noisy and can even become kinematically incorrect. At the same time, however, the depth image, which was obtained from their migration, still shows clearly all the illuminated subsurface structures at their correct positions. For the elastic case, we review a relationship between the reflection Green’s functions and the transmission Green’s functions derived from a two-way wavefield reciprocity theorem. Using modeling examples, we show how to reconstruct the different components of the particle velocity observed at the surface and resulting from a surface traction source. This reconstruciton is achieved using crosscorrelations of particle velocity components measured at the surface and resulting from separate P- and S-wave sources in the subsurface.