Least square Q-Kirchhoff migration: implementation and application

The absorption effect caused by the anelastic nature of earth leads to attenuation of amplitudes and distortion of phases for seismic wave. The so-called Q factor has to be compensated for correct imaging. We propose least square Q-Kirchhoff migration (LSQPSDM) in which absorption is incorporated into Kirchhoff modeling operator and Q compensation is achieved naturally via inversion with proper sparse constraints. With better illumination and Q compensation, fault imaging is naturally enhanced through the proposed least square Q-Kirchhoff migration. The proposed LSQPSDM approach has been applied to a synthetic data and a field dataset from NWS Australia. Better fault imaging and SNR are obtained comparing to conventional Q migration.