Home – Home – Jornals – Russian Geology and Geophysics 2006 number 3

Offset wavefield continuation (DMO procedure) precedes migration or AVO analysis and simplifies the processing by reducing common-offset seismic gathers to zero offset. Then, the DMO algorithm itself should be quite elegant. Frequency-domain solutions can employ FFT but the available spectral algorithms fail to resolve the true geometry of reflections even in the high-frequency limit. We suggest to solve the DMO equation using the WKB method. The new algorithm includes several transformations of variables applied to reduce Fomel's partial differential equation to an equation resolvable by the classical WKB method. The WKB-based solution was tested in several numerical experiments and showed to resolve the geometry of plane and curved shallow dipping reflectors to a sufficient accuracy.