Abstract
Reverse Time Migration (RTM) Surface Offset Gathers (SOGs) are
demonstrated to deliver more superior residual dip information than
ray-based approaches. It appears more powerful in complex geological
settings, such as salt areas. Still, the computational cost of
constructing RTM SOGs is a big challenge in applying it to 3D field
data. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel method using dips of
local events as a guide for RTM gather interpolation. The residual-dip
information of the SOGs is created by connecting local events from
depth-domain to time-domain via ray tracing. The proposed method is
validated by a synthetic experiment and a field example. It mitigates
the computational cost by an order of magnitude while producing
comparable results as fully computed RTM SOGs.