A New CMP Stack Concept Based on the Born Approximation

The standard common-midpoint (CMP) stack procedure becomes questionable as soon as varying reflector dips at about the same two-way time (TWT) are involved. There are several ways to handle that problem ranging from pre stack migration to dip moveout (DMO). This paper presents a new alternative which employs the same physical model of the medium that is in common use for migration: scatterers embedded in a known reference velocity field. Provided that backscattering can be described by the (first) Born approximation, it is possible to derive a zero-offset trace from a CMP gather by a procedure that relies entirely on known processing steps like normal moveout (NMO) and stacking.