Wavepath-consistent Effective Q Estimation for Q-compensated Reverse-time Migration

We propose a method for compensating for Q effects in reverse-time migration. The new method relies upon running acoustic propagators twice to estimate attenuated traveltimes along wavepaths that are then used to filter the conventional source and receiver wavefields to compensate for amplitude and phase effects prior to imaging. As this method does not rely upon two-way time-domain viscoacoustic propagators, we avoid the difficulty of stabilizing backward propagation of the receiver wavefield when amplitudes are amplified. By separately applying phase and amplitude filters post modelling we can efficiently tune the stabilization of the amplitude amplification filter without altering the phase compensation. If required for model building, we can produce a suite of images using different percentages of the original Q model at little extra cost.