Subsalt Imaging Based on the Beam Propagation through Irregular Interfaces

In this study, it is presented a method that aims to overcome some of the limitations of beam propagation based on high frequency ray tracing in complex velocity models that contain complex interfaces.

The method is based on local smoothing of the interface. With a modest increase in computational cost, the method presented captures the wave kinematics and dynamic that are comparable to finite-difference wave propagation with higher fidelity while staying within the ray tracing framework, without requiring processing or alteration to the original model.

There is presented comparison of the method with finite-difference wave propagation in numerical simulations.

The method is applied for subsalt beam imaging. Imaging results for Sigsbee2a data set are presented.