Elastic reverse time migration of marine walkaway vertical seismic profiling data

Abstract Walkaway vertical seismic profiling (VSP) acquisition with three-component geophones allows for direct measurement of compressional as well as shear energy. This makes full elastic reverse time migration an attractive alternative for imaging data. We present results from elastic reverse time migration of a marine walkaway VSP acquired offshore Norway. The reverse time migration scheme is based on a high-order finite-difference solution to the two-way elastic wave equation. Depth images of the subsurface are constructed by correlation of forward- and back-propagated elastic wavefields. In the walkaway VSP configuration, the number of shots is much larger than the number of geophone levels. Using processing methods operating in the shot/receiver domain, it is advantageous to use the reciprocal relationship between the walkaway VSP and the reverse VSP configurations. We do this by imaging each component of each geophone level as a reverse VSP common shot gather. The final images are constructed by stacking partial images from each level. The depth images obtained from the vertical components reveal the major characteristics of the geological structure below geophone depth. A graben in the base Cretaceous unconformity and a faulted coal layer can be identified. The horizontal components are more difficult to image. Compared to the vertical components, the horizontal component images are more corrupted by migration artifacts. This is because the horizontal component images are more sensitive to aperture effects and to the shear-wave velocity macromodel. When converted to two-way time, the migration results tie well with the surface seismic section. Comparison of fully elastic and acoustic reverse time migration shows that the vertical component is dominantly PP-reflected events, whereas the horizontal components get important contributions from PS-converted energy. The horizontal components also provide higher resolution because of the shorter wavelength of the shear waves.