SEGJ Technical Conference

Reverse time migration and seismic interferometry for marine wide-angle reflection survey

Abstract Wave-theory based techniques such as reverse time migration (RTM) are useful for subsurface imaging using full wavefield of sparse seismic data. This study proposes a new method for subsurface imaging with wide-angle reflection data based on reverse time migration and seismic interferometry. A comparative study with a field dataset is shown in this paper: (1) a conventional shot base RTM (SB-RTM) for primary reflections, and (2) image domain seismic interferometry with RTM (SI-RTM) for multiple reflections, and (3) SB-RTM after seismic interferometric redatuming of multiple reflections. The primary reflection imaging is useful for deep target, and the multiple reflection imaging is useful for high resolution imaging of shallow target. Consequently, combination use of (1) the SB-RTM with primary reflections and (2) the SI-RTM with multiple reflections is effective to obtain the continuous reflection image from seafloor to the deep efficiently.