Beam migration for imaging of complex geology

Abstract

Beam Migration provides an effective alternative to Kirchhoff or wave equation migration. Beam Migration relaxes the single arrival limitation of Kirchhoff while retaining its steep dip capability. There are a number of different types of Beam Migration implementations such as Hill?s Gaussian Beam Migration. Our implementation of Beam Migration is unique in the industry and involves a decomposition of the data into dip components using the Radon transform and a back-propagation of the dip components into the earth. The dip components can be enhanced based on various criteria before the back-propagation, thereby giving a more coherent image. The methodology inherently allows the attenuation of multiple energy, and coherent as well as non coherent noise. Our implementation of Beam Migration (which we refer to as BPSDM for Beam Pre-Stack Depth Migration) has merits of simplicity, economy, flexibility, and future development possibilities. Migrated images have excellent accuracy and quality, especially in areas of poor signal to noise ratio and steep dip. The relative economy makes it an excellent velocity estimation tool to use prior to other, more computation intensive, depth migration methods.