Compensating for visco-acoustic effects in TTI reverse time migration

The anelastic effects of the overburden cause seismic amplitude attenuation, wavelet phase distortion and seismic resolution reduction. It is desirable to correct the frequency dependent energy attenuation and phase distortion in a prestack depth migration. The situation becomes more challenging in complex geological regions with the presence of absorption, such as complex shallow gas clouds. The wavefields can be severely complicated and distorted by strong velocity contrast with the surroundings and serious attenuation, hence mask the image of the deep objectives. To deal with such challenges associated with absorption in complex geological regions which quite often needs to account for multi-pathing and anisotropy in wave propagation, we have developed a stable visco-acoustic TTI Reverse Time Migration based on our derived formulation for visco-acoustic wave propagation in TTI medium to compensate for the anelastic effects in the seismic data. We will demonstrate our visco-acoustic TTI Reverse Time Migration with both synthetic and field data examples.