Scalar and vector imaging based on wave mode decoupling for elastic reverse time migration in isotropic and transversely isotropic media

Abstract

Recording P- and S-wave modes acquires more information related to rock properties of the earth’s interior. Elastic migration, as a part of multicomponent seismic data processing, potentially offers a great improvement over conventional acoustic migration to create a spatial image of some medium properties. In the framework of elastic reverse time migration, we have developed new scalar and vector imaging conditions assisted by efficient polarization-based mode decoupling to avoid crosstalk among the different wave modes for isotropic and transversely isotropic media. For the scalar imaging, we corrected polarity reversal of zero-lag PS images using the local angular attributes on the fly of angle-domain imaging. For the vector imaging, we naturally used the polarization information in the decoupled single-mode vector fields to automatically avoid the polarity reversal and to estimate the local angular attributes for angle-domain imaging. Examples of increasing complexity in 2D and 3D cases found that the proposed approaches can be used to obtain a physically interpretable image and angle-domain common-image gather at an acceptable computational cost. Decoupling and imaging the 3D S-waves involves some complexity, which has not been addressed in the literature. For this reason, we also attempted at illustrating the physical contents of the two separated S-wave modes and their contribution to seismic full-wave imaging.