Migration Methods

Seismic Data Migration Methods


1. Kirchoff Migration
2. Gaussian Beam migration

Gaussian beam migration (Hill, 1990, 2001) is an elegant, accurate, and efficient depth migration method. It has the ability to image complicated geologic structures with fidelity exceeding that of single-arrival Kirchhoff migration and approaching that of wave-equation migration. In fact, its accuracy can exceed that of most wave-equation migrations in imaging very steep dips, especially in three dimensions and especially in the presence of anisotropy.

The success of Gaussian beam migration has sparked interest in beam migrations, some based on Gaussian beams, others not. Some variations of beam migration have as their sole purpose the speedup of Kirchhoff migration (Sun et al., 2000); others use wavefield extrapolation to build migration Green’s functions (Brandsberg-Dahl, 2003); still others use wavelet decomposition of seismic wavefields to emulate the simultaneous space/wavenumber localization property of Gaussian beam migration (Wu et al., 2002).

3. Reverse Time migration