A new approach to pre-stack seismic processing

Pre-stack processing of seismic reflection data is significantly simplified if the data organization is the same as that in which the data were acquired in the field; that is, in time slices through common-source gathers. For an impulsive source, the entire processing stream reduces to two elements: velocity analysis and reverse-time pre-stack migration. Many of the steps that are applied as independent operations in standard processing (including demultiplexing, sorting into common-midpoint gathers, elevation corrections, near-surface velocity static corrections, first break muting, ground roll removal, and both normal and dip move-out corrections) either are eliminated, or are applied implicitly during migration. This approach is ideally suited to parallel processing, and can be implemented in machines with small processor memories.