3-D prestack migration of common‐azimuth data

In principle, downward continuation of 3-D prestack data should be carried out in the 5-D space of full 3-D prestack geometry (recording time, source surface location, and receiver surface location), even when the data sets to be migrated have fewer dimensions, as in the case of common‐azimuth data sets that are only four dimensional. This increase in dimensionality of the computational space causes a severe increase in the amount of computations required for migrating the data. Unless this computational efficiency issue is solved, 3-D prestack migration methods based on downward continuation cannot compete with Kirchhoff methods. We address this problem by presenting a method for downward continuing common‐azimuth data in the original 4-D space of the common‐azimuth data geometry. The method is based on a new common‐azimuth downward‐continuation operator derived by a stationary‐phase approximation of the full 3-D prestack downward‐continuation operator expressed in the frequency‐wavenumber domain. Although the new common‐azimuth operator is exact only for constant velocity, a ray‐theoretical interpretation of the stationary‐phase approximation enables us to derive an accurate generalization of the method to media with both vertical and lateral velocity variations. The proposed migration method successfully imaged a synthetic data set that was generated assuming strong lateral and vertical velocity gradients. The common‐azimuth downward‐continuation theory also can be applied to the derivation of a computationally efficient constant‐velocity Stolt migration of common‐azimuth data. The Stolt migration formulation leads to the important theoretical result that constant‐velocity common‐azimuth migration can be split into two exact sequential migration processes: 2-D prestack migration along the inline direction, followed by 2-D zero‐offset migration along the cross‐line direction.