3-D prestack Kirchhoff beam migration for depth imaging

Abstract

A beam implementation is presented for efficient full‐volume 3-D prestack Kirchhoff depth migration of seismic data. Unlike conventional Kirchhoff migration in which the input seismic traces in time are migrated one trace at a time into the 3-D image volume for the earth’s subsurface, the beam migration processes a group of input traces (a supergather) together. The requirement for a supergather is that the source and receiver coordinates of the traces fall into two small surface patches. The patches are small enough that a single set of time maps pertaining to the centers of the patches can be used to migrate all the traces within the supergather by Taylor expansion or interpolation. The migration of a supergather consists of two major steps: stacking the traces into a τ-P beam volume, and mapping the beams into the image volume. Since the beam volume is much smaller than the image volume, the beam migration cost is roughly proportional to the number of input supergathers. The computational speedup of beam migration over conventional Kirchhoff migration is roughly proportional to [Formula: see text], the average number of traces per supergather, resulting a theoretical speedup up to two orders of magnitudes. The beam migration was successfully implemented and has been in production use for several years. A factor of 5–25 speedup has been achieved in our in‐house depth migrations. The implementation made 3-D prestack full‐volume depth imaging feasible in a parallel distributed environment.