Multi-azimuth Prestack Time Migration for General Anisotropic, Weakly Heterogeneous Media - Field Data Examples

Multi-azimuth data acquisition has shown benefits in noise reduction and structure illumination, which leads generally to improved seismic images. However the current time processing, which is based on independent processing of the data from the different predominant azimuths, may lead to destructive interferences and deterioration of the final stacked image when the earth model is anisotropic or laterally heterogeneous. In order to solve this problem a prestack time migration for anisotropic, weakly heterogeneous media has been recently introduced and tested on synthetic data. In this work, we ran a first field data application on a multi-azimuth data set. From data in three different acquisition azimuths we performed migration velocity analysis to build azimuth-dependent migration operators. We processed the data in parallel also with conventional narrow azimuth prestack time migration in order to assess the performance of the new approach.