Migration Algorithms

Kirchhoff Pre-Stack Depth Migration (KPSDM)
KPSDM is a full Kirchhoff-diffraction summation algorithm that includes state-of-the-art anti-aliasing filters, full VTI and TTI anisotropy and Beylkin amplitude corrections.

Travel times are computed by a dynamic ray tracer using the wavefront reconstruction technique, yielding very accurate results, as well as dynamic amplitude corrections.

KPSDM is fully parallelized and scales linearly to thousands of cluster nodes.

Wave Equation Migration (WEM)
Wave equation migration is a shot domain migration based on the paraxial approximation of the full wave equation.

Regularization is handled within the migration and an adaptive grid size is chosen dynamically during run times.

Angle gathers can be computed, and a VTI implementation is available.

Steep Dip Wave Equation Migration
Traditional WEM suffers from dip limitations and cannot accurately image dips greater than 65 degrees. Geotrace has developed a new Wave Equation Migration that has no dip limitations. The computational cost is not as high as for RTM and the dip response is similar.

It is based on a 3D two-pass approach that circumvents dip limitation by using orthogonal operators.

Turning Ray Wave Equation Migration was applied to the 2D BP synthetic data set and a portion shown in the adjacent panel showing a very steep salt flank imaged independently than the rest of the image, using this method, at a fraction of the of RTM. The two passes are independent so the technique can be used as a “fishing” tool to explore different salt configurations without paying a very high price.

Reverse Time Migration (RTM*)
Reverse time migration is a wave equation migration algorithm where no approximations have been made. It suffers from none of the shortcomings inherent to the WEM and has a full dip response capable of imaging turning rays.

Reverse time migration can generate illumination volumes based on the 2-way wave equation.

*Offered through a licensing agreement with Panorama Technologies.

Anisotropic Seismic Depth Migration to aid Tight Gas Prospectivity in the Mountain Front region of the Anadarko Basin (presented at SEG, October, 2009)

Steep Dip Imaging Using an Orthogonal One-Way Wave Equation Migration (Presented at EAGE June, 2009)