Extended Imaging and Illumination in Wave Migrations | SLB

Extended Imaging and Illumination in Wave Migrations

Published: 09/23/2013

Premium
Schlumberger Oilfield Services

Subsurface illumination is an important consideration in survey design. Uneven illumination can distort or obscure seismic targets. Many factors affect the illumination of subsurface structures, including acquisition geometry, complex overburden shape and reflector dip angle. For a given acquisition geometry, the transformation of recording points to virtual sources allows for extended subsurface illumination for a particular shot. In marine surveys, strong surface multiples are often recorded; however, they are typically separated from primary reflections for imaging. Multiples contain information about the subsurface and have the potential for extended illumination. Injecting recorded multiples at the receiver locations essentially transforms receiver points to virtual sources in a migration. In this paper, we compare the imaging capacity of freesurface multiples using different migration kernels, a oneway and a two-way wavefield extrapolators. A two-way wavefield extrapolator overcomes the steep-dip limitation of the one-way extrapolator, at the expense of potential increase in imaging artifacts. Results from migrations using a synthetic dataset shot over the SEG Advanced Modeling Corporation (SEAM) 3D model are compared. Imaging of multiples only is compared with benchmark images of primaries only to isolate the potential of multiples for extended illumination and imaging.

THIS ITEM IS PREMIUM CONTENT. TO ACCESS THE FULL CONTENT, SIGN IN OR REGISTER BELOW.
Sign in or register