τ‐migration and velocity analysis: application to data from the Red Sea

Imaging pre‐salt reflections for data acquired from the coastal region of the Red Sea is a task that requires prestack migration velocity analysis. Conventional post‐stack time processing lacks the lateral inhomogeneity capability, necessary for such a problem. Prestack migration velocity analysis in the vertical time domain reduces the velocity–depth ambiguity that usually hampers the performance of prestack depth‐migration velocity analysis. In prestack τ‐migration velocity analysis, the interval velocity model and the output images are defined in τ (i.e. vertical time). As a result, we avoid placing reflectors at erroneous depths during the velocity analysis process and thus avoid inaccurately altering the shape of the velocity model, which in turn speeds up the convergence to the true model. Using a 1D velocity update scheme, the prestack τ‐migration velocity analysis produces good images of data from the Midyan region of the Red Sea. For the first seismic line from this region, only three prestack τ‐migration velocity analysis iterations were required to focus pre‐salt reflections in τ. However, the second line, which crosses the first line, is slightly more complicated and thus required five iterations to reach the final, reasonably focused, τ‐image. After mapping the images for the two crossing lines to depth, using the final velocity models, the placements of reflectors in the two 2D lines were consistent at their crossing point. Some errors occurred due to the influence of out‐of‐plane reflections on 2D imaging. However, such errors are identifiable and are generally small.