Elastic Wave Field Extrapolation (PDF)

Extrapolation of seismic waves from the earth's surface to any level in the subsurface plays an essential role in many advanced seismic processing schemes, such as migration, inverse scattering and redatuming. At present these schemes are based on the acoustic wave equation. This means not only that S-waves (shear waves) are ignored, but also that P-waves (compressional waves) are not handled correctly. In the seismic industry there is an important trend towards multi-component data acquisition. For processing of multi-component seismic data, ignoring S-waves can no longer be justified. Wave field extrapolation should therefore be based on the full elastic wave equation.

In this book the authors review acoustic one-way extrapolation of P-waves and introduce elastic one-way extrapolation of P- and S-waves. They demonstrate that elastic extrapolation of multi-component data, decomposed into P- and S-waves, is essentially equivalent to acoustic extrapolation of P-waves. This has the important practical consequence that elastic processing of multi-component seismic data need not be significantly more complicated than acoustic processing of single-component seismic data. This is demonstrated in the final chapters, which deal with the application of wave field extrapolation in the redatuming process of single- and multi-component seismic data.

Geophysicists, and anyone who is interested in a review of acoustic and elastic wave theory, will find this book useful. It is also a suitable textbook for graduate students and those following courses in elastic wave field extrapolation as each subject is introduced in a relatively simple manner using the scalar acoustic wave equation. In the chapters on elastic wave field extrapolation the formulation, whenever possible, is analogous to that used in the chapters on acoustic wave field extrapolation. The text is illustrated throughout and a bibliography and keyword index are provided.