Postmap migration of crosswell reflection seismic data

Abstract

Vertical seismic profiling/common depth point (VSP‐CDP) mapping is often preferred to crosswell migration when imaging crosswell seismic reflection data. The principal advantage of VSP‐CDP mapping is that it can be configured as a one‐to‐one operation between data in the acquisition domain and data in the image domain and therefore does not smear coherent noise such as tube waves, guided waves, and converted waves as crosswell migration could. However, unlike crosswell migration, VSP‐CDP mapping cannot collapse diffractions; therefore, the lateral resolution of reflection events suffers.We present a migration algorithm that is applied to the crosswell data after they have been mapped. By performing crosswell migration in two distinct steps—mapping followed by diffraction stacking—noise events can be identified and filtered in the mapped domain without smearing effects commonly associated with conventional crosswell migration operators. Tests on noise‐free synthetic crosswell data indicate that the two‐step migration yields results nearly identical with conventional crosswell migration.Our specific implementation of the two‐step migration algorithm maps the data using an estimate of the interwell velocity field and then performs diffraction stacking using a constant‐velocity assumption. The migrated results are confined to the mapped region to reduce edge effects commonly associated with conventional crosswell migration. Results from synthetic data indicate that the constant‐velocity assumption used for diffraction stacking is remarkably robust, even for models with large vertical velocity variation. It is, however, important that the data are mapped with the correct interwell velocity model. After applying postmap migration to two field data sets mapped by VSP‐CDP mapping, better fault resolution was achieved and the lateral resolution was improved significantly.