Quantitative Control of Migration: A Geostatistical Attempt

This paper is devoted to a geostatistical attempt at modeling migration errors when localizing a reflector in the ground. Starting with a probabilistic velocity model and choosing the simple geometrical optics background for the wave propagation in such media, we give the expression of the errors. This may be quantified provided the covariance of the velocity field is known. Variance of arrival times at constant offset is related to the covariance of the velocity field at hand. A practical application is given in the same paragraph. After that we give a typical schema for migration and uncertainty modeling: starting with seismic data, we make the weak seismic inversion. We then obtain the covariance of the velocity field that we use for simulating migration errors. The main issues of this methodology are discussed in the last paragraph.