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Efficient, target-oriented 3-D prestack depth migration in two steps

The Andrews Group, Houston Texas, U.S.

Claudio Nieto

Petróleos Méxicanos, Reynosa, Tamaulipas, México

Alvaro Chaveste

The Andrews Group, Houston Texas, U.S.

Jesús Castañeda

AGI Mexicana, México D.F., México

Corresponding author: H. Meinardus, hmeinard@agi-hou.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, poststack time migration of 3-D seismic data was routinely carried out in two steps: The 2-D migration of the traces in one direction was followed by their 2-D migration in the orthogonal direction. This approach was mainly dictated by the state of computer hardware at that time and allowed efficient 3-D migration of stacked data volumes as described in "Efficient 3-D migration in two steps" by Gibson et al. (Geophysical Prospecting, 1983). Advances in computer technology make 3-D poststack depth migration in one step possible on state-of-the-art workstations. However, 3-D prestack depth migration in one step is very taxing on the computer resources available on smaller workstations and many are executed as 2-D migrations.

This article describes an alternate approach to target-oriented 3-D prestack depth migration along the lines of two-pass 3-D prestack depth migration described by Canning and Gardner in "Two-pass 3-D prestack depth migration" (SEG 1993 Expanded Abstracts). In our approach we replace their first cross-line prestack imaging step (PSI) by an equivalent prestack time migration in the cross-line direction. The two-pass migration scheme is then completed by 2-D prestack depth migration in the in-line direction. This approach utilizes only commercially available 2-D prestack migration software and is kinematically correct for a constant-velocity medium. We evaluated the usefulness of the constant-velocity assumption and the practical aspects of two-pass prestack migration on a 3-D data set from the Burgos Basin in northern Mexico and compared the results with alternatives such as 3-D poststack time migration in one step and 2-D prestack depth migration of a selected line.

The field where we evaluated the two-pass prestack depth migration is in siliciclastic rocks of Oligocene age. The main structural feature is a slightly elongated anticline with the principal axis oriented north-northwest to . . . [Full Text of this Article]