Technical Paper: A New Pseudo-acoustic Wave Equation for VTI Media

Society: EAGE
Paper Number:
Presentation Date: 2008
 

Seismic anisotropy is observed in many exploration areas (e.g., the North Sea, offshore West Africa, the Canadian Foothills, and the Gulf of Mexico). Conventional isotropic migration methods for seismic imaging are insufficient in these areas. Many researchers have implemented two-way wave equation modeling and migration in anisotropic media with pseudo-acoustic approximations (Klie and Toro, 2001; Zhou et al., 2006; Hestholm, 2007). Alkhalifah (2000) introduced a pseudo-acoustic approximation for vertical transversely isotropic (VTI) media. Although this dispersion relation for a scalar wavefield has kinematics that are close to those of the qP-arrivals in the real elastic vector wavefield, it allows spurious SV-like events (Grechka et al., 2004). Based on Alkhalifah’s approximation, different space/time-domain wave equations have been proposed (Alkhalifah, 2000; Zhou et al., 2006). The following description focuses on a new pseudo-acoustic VTI wave equation also derived from Alkhalifah’s dispersion relation.

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