MULTICOMPONENT COMMON‐RECEIVER GATHER MIGRATION OF SINGLE‐LEVEL WALK‐AWAY SEISMIC PROFILES

Seismic data are usually separated into P-waves and S-waves before being put through a scalar (acoustic) migration. The relationship between polarization and moveout is exploited to design filters that extract the desired wavetype. While these filters can always be applied to shot records, they can only be applied to a triaxial common-receiver gather in special cases since the moveout of scattered energy on the receiver gather relates to path differences between the surface shots and the scatterer while the polarization is determined by the path from scatterer to downhole geophone. Without the ability to separate wavefields before migration, a vector scalar or an elastic migration becomes a necessity. In this paper the propagation of the elastic wavefield for a given mode (e.g. P-S) is approximated by two scalar (acoustic) propagation steps in a vector scalar migration. Vector in that multicomponent data is migrated and scalar in that each propagation step is based on a scalar wave equation for the appropriate mode. It is assumed that interaction between the wavefields occurs only once in the far-field of both the source and receiver. Extraction of the P, SV and SH wavefields can be achieved within the depth migration (if one assumes isotropymore » in the neighborhood of the downhole receiver) by a projection onto the polarization for the desired mode. Since the polarization of scattered energy is only a function of scatterer position and receiver position (and not source position), the projection may be taken outside the migration integral in the special case of the depth migration of a common-receiver gather. The extraction of the desired mode is then performed for each depth migration bin after the separate scalar migration of each receiver gather component.« less