We present a method for estimating the shape of salt bodies by using ray-based nonlinear slope tomography. The data to invert mainly consist of residual moveout (RMO) observed below salt shapes on migrated common image point gathers. We compute Fréchet derivatives made of traveltime derivatives with respect to depth Bsplines parameters describing salt bounding surface. Salt shape is progressively updated after each linearized tomographic step. We demonstrate the method on a 2D synthetic example and on a high-fold 3D land dataset from the Sultanate of Oman.
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SEG - Society of Exploration GeophysicistsAuthors
Patrice Guillaume, Stanislaw Warzocha, Olivier Hermant, Anthony Prescott