Green’s function representations for seismic interferometry

Abstract

The term seismic interferometry refers to the principle of generating new seismic responses by crosscorrelating seismic observations at different receiver locations. The first version of this principle was derived by Claerbout (1968), who showed that the reflection response of a horizontally layered medium can be synthesized from the autocorrelation of its transmission response. For an arbitrary 3D inhomogeneous lossless medium it follows from Rayleigh’s reciprocity theorem and the principle of time-reversal invariance that the acoustic Green’s function between any two points in the medium can be represented by an integral of crosscorrelations of wavefield observations at those two points. The integral is along sources on an arbitrarily shaped surface enclosing these points. No assumptions are made with respect to the diffusivity of the wavefield. The Rayleigh-Betti reciprocity theorem leads to a similar representation of the elastodynamic Green’s function. When a part of the enclosing surface is the earth’s free surface, the integral needs only to be evaluated over the remaining part of the closed surface. In practice, not all sources are equally important: The main contributions to the reconstructed Green’s function come from sources at stationary points. When the sources emit transient signals, a shaping filter can be applied to correct for the differences in source wavelets. When the sources are uncorrelated noise sources, the representation simplifies to a direct crosscorrelation of wavefield observations at two points, similar as in methods that retrieve Green’s functions from diffuse wavefields in disordered media or in finite media with an irregular bounding surface.