True Amplitude Migration Weights from Travel Times

— 3-D amplitude preserving prestack migration of the Kirchhoff type is a task of high computational effort. A substantial part of this effort is spent on the calculation of proper weight functions for the diffraction stack. We propose a new strategy to compute the migration weights directly from coarse gridded travel-time data which are in any event needed for the summation along diffraction time surfaces. The technique employs second-order travel-time derivatives that contain all necessary information on the weight functions. Their determination alone from travel times significantly reduces the requirements in computational time and particularly storage, since it is done on the fly. Application of the method shows good accordance between numerical and analytical results for the simple types of models considered in this study.