Illumination Studies with Acquisition Geometry and Depth Images Comparison

This paper presents a way to perform qualitative and quantitative analyses for Seismic Illumination using Acoustic Wave Equation solved by Finite Difference Method. A target-oriented methodology based on Alves et al. (2008, 2009) is employed to evaluate illumination values with the Energy Matrix that gives an estimative of the illumination energy for a specific point, chosen at the subsurface of the velocity model. The proposed methodology is target-oriented, ideal for complex models such as the pre-salt and allows evaluation of different configurations of acquisition from a single wavefield extrapolation. Since it doesn’t require successive migrations, the method has a lower computational cost than traditional methods based on generating a dataset followed by migration. Numerical results are presented and analyzed in a modified version of the Hess velocity model.