3-D Tomographic Amplitude Inversion for Compensating Transmission Losses in the Overburden

A tomographic inversion approach using prestack depth migrated common image gathers is utilized to compensate reflection data for amplitude loss caused by transmission anomalies in the overburden. The approach has the advantage of estimating transmission losses from anywhere within the overburden using the actual seismic raypaths. Examples show that the method can mitigate amplitude attenuation caused by transmission anomalies and should be considered as one of the processes for amplitude preserving processing that is important for AVO analysis when transmission anomalies are present.