Understanding and improving the subsalt image at Thunder Horse, Gulf of Mexico

Subsalt imaging is challenging at the Thunder Horse field in the Gulf of Mexico primarily because of the salt canopy overlying roughly 75% of the structure. Since the Thunder Horse discovery, advancements in seismic acquisition techniques and imaging technologies have helped improve subsalt imaging. The latest successful application is from a tilted transverse isotropy (TTI) reverse time migration (RTM) project combining two wide azimuth towed streamer (WATS) data sets and three narrow azimuth towed streamer (NATS) data sets. We present the results from this project to showcase some key contributors to the dramatic structural image improvements with better defined three-way events and a higher signal-to-noise ratio (S/N).