A COMPARISON BETWEEN KIRCHHOFF AND GRT MIGRATION ON VSP DATA1

A modern approach to migration is to perform wavefield extrapolation, subject to an imaging condition. Correct wavefield extrapolation requires that the boundary conditions at the array of geophones satisfy the wave equation. A sufficient condition is to perform the survey with a single stationary source. Contrary to this condition, many VSPs are conducted in deviated wells, where the source is maintained vertically above the down-hole geophone at each well station. Such a survey fails to provide the boundary conditions theoretically necessary for wave-equation migration. A recently published inversion scheme, referred to as acoustic generalized Radon transform migration (GRT migration), was developed to handle any configuration of sources and geophones, including moving-source deviated-well VSP surveys. GRT migration may be viewed as a weighted version of the generalized Kirchhoff migration, derived in this paper from the exploding-reflector model. When a VSP-survey geometry has been specified, GRT migration can be expressed in terms of array parameters, and compared with the equivalent expression for Kirchhoff (wave-equation) migration. The differences between the two integrals are significant and their effect is demonstrated on VSP data.