
Full text loading...
Seismic diffraction imaging is recognized as a rapidly emerging technology with great potential to reduce exploration and production risks and increase recovery, for conventional reservoirs as well as unconventional resources such as shale gas. The idea behind diffraction imaging in a pre-stack migration framework is to apply a weight factor inside the migration loops, which attenuates events that satisfy Snell's law of specular reflection, while preserving diffractive events that do not satisfy Snell's law. Here we further develop an approach, called specularity gathers, to construct the weight factor in a very efficient way. We introduce a method to filter the specular energy from specularity gathers in order to obtain diffraction images. The use of a filter like plane-wave destructor enables an automatic algorithm, but leaves the option for interactive updates based on interpretation input as well. Further development of this method will help in advancing diffraction imaging technology.