Residual moveout in anisotropic angle-domain common-image gathers

Abstract

I develop the fundamental concepts for quantitatively relating perturbations in anisotropic parameters to the corresponding reflector movements in angle-domain common-image gathers (ADCIGs) after anisotropic wavefield-continuation migration. The proposed theory potentially enables the application of residual moveout (RMO) analysis of ADCIGs to velocity estimation in realistic anisotropic conditions. I demonstrate that linearization of the relationship between anisotropic velocity parameters and reflector movements can be derived by assuming stationary raypaths. This assumption leads to a fairly simple analytical derivation. I then apply the general method to the particular case of RMO analysis of reflections from flat reflectors in a vertical transverse isotropic (VTI) medium. This analysis yields expressions to predict RMO curves in migrated ADCIGs. These RMO expressions are functions of both the phase aperture angle and the group aperture angle. Several numerical examples demonstrate the accuracy of the RMO curves predicted by my kinematic analysis. The synthetic examples also show that approximating the group angles with the phase angles in the application of the RMO expressions may lead to substantial errors for events reflected at wide aperture angles. The results obtained by migrating a 2D line extracted from a Gulf of Mexico 3D data set confirm the accuracy of the proposed method. The RMO curves predicted by the theory match the RMO function observed in the ADCIGs computed from the real data.