An Introduction to the Common Reflection Surface Stack

The success of standaxd seismic reflection imaging routines, such as Prestack Depth Migration or NMO/DMO/stack depends on the required macro-velocity model. Since their Kirchhoff type implementations collect all possible measured reflections events belonging to either a point in the time or in the depth domain they cannot account for the correct shape of the reflector. In contrast, a common-reflection surface (CRS) stack is a selective stack which depends only on the near-surface velocity. The CRS stack provides a new powerful approach to construct simulated zero-offset (ZO) sections from multicoverage reflection data. It accounts for arbitrary reflector shapes and enables us to establish the macro velocity model after the zero-offset simulation.