Gaussian-beam-based seismic illumination analysis

Peng Wen*, Jiang Xianyi, and Zhou Shuang, BGP, CNPC

Summary

Seismic wave illumination analysis provides the seismic
wave energy and other information at the scattering point
on a target layer, so it can be used to analyze imaging
shadow and acquisition footprint, optimize acquisition
geometry design and improve the imaging quality of pre-
stack depth migration. However, the seismic illumination
analysis based on either one-way or two-way wave
equation is time-consuming. Therefore, this analysis is not
widely used in practice. In order to improve the
computational efficiency of seismic illumination without
losing wave field characteristics, a new illumination
analysis method which employs Gaussian beams to
calculate seismic wave field is presented in this paper.
Numerical examples indicate that the Gaussian-beam-based
seismic illumination is a highly efficient tool to evaluate
the effects of the designed seismic geometry.

Introduction

Seismic illumination analysis can be applied to seismic
acquisition and seismic imaging. It has been proven that
seismic wave illumination analysis is an important
approach to the target-oriented seismic survey design. By
calculating the illumination generated from different
shooting patterns and geometries, the optimum acquisition
geometry can be identified.

One of the key steps in seismic illumination analysis is
generating seismic wave field through seismic modeling.
Seismic illumination analysis can therefore be classified
into two groups, ray-based method (Schneider and Winbow,
1999; Bear et al., 2000) and wave-equation-based method
(Wu and Chen, 2002, 2003; Xie et al., 2003, 2006).

The method of two-point ray tracing is characterized by its
high efficiency. However it can only simulate the kinematic
characteristics of seismic wave field. In addition, although
the ray-based illumination analysis can handle both
irregular acquisition geometry and laterally varying
velocity models, it can not generate accurate results in the
caustic and shadow zones (Hoffmann, 2001).

By contrast, the feature of wave-equation simulation is high
precision, but it is time-consuming. At present, the wave-
equation-based method is still too expensive for
illumination analysis. As a result, it is difficult to use the
wave-equation-based illumination to optimize seismic
acquisition design in practice.

The Gaussian beam method is developed from paraxial
asymptotic ray theory. It has been proven that this method
is a very stable asymptotic approach for the computation of
high-frequency wave fields in smoothly varying
inhomogeneous media. One of the advantages of this
method is that the individual Gaussian beams have no
singularities even in regions where the ray method fails,
such as the caustic region, critical region, etc. Another
advantage is that the Gaussian beam algorithm does not
require two-point (source-to-receiver) ray tracing. The
numerical modeling based on Gaussian beam algorithm
requires approximately the same computer running time as
ray method and the memory requirements of these two
methods are also comparable. By using complex travel time
and amplitude in the dynamic ray tracing, Gaussian beam
approach can provide the dynamic characteristics of
seismic wave field (erven, 1985; Nowack, 2003). Under
the condition of computational capabilities of the present
computers, the Gaussian beam method can meet the need of
the seismic acquisition design in terms of seismic
illumination analysis.

In this paper, we present an illumination analysis method
using Gaussian beams to calculate wave field energy. As
the illumination of one source-receiver pair acts as the
primary role in the seismic wave illumination analysis, we
focus on the illumination of one source-receiver pair, which
is related to source, receiver and reflection points. By
summation of the illumination of the user-defined source-
receiver pairs, different illumination analysis results can be
obtained. For example, by summation of the illumination of
the source-receiver pairs of the same offset and azimuth
range, the common offset-azimuth illumination can be
generated, including the source side, receiver side and both
the source and receiver side illumination. We use a
horizontal layer model to demonstrate the illumination
analysis of one source-receiver pair and a complex three-
dimensional model to demonstrate the agreement between
the forward stacked section and the illumination result.

Theory and Method

Three steps are involved in the seismic illumination
analysis based on Gaussian beams. The first step is the
calculation of the seismic wave energy based on the
seismic wave field generated from the Gaussian beam
algorithm. The second step is to calculate the illumination
of each source-receiver pair. And the last step is to compute
all kinds of user-defined illumination for a given seismic
acquisition geometry.

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Gaussian beam based illumination
Step 1: Calculation of the seismic wave energy based on
Gaussian beam algorithm

As seismic wave field can be expressed as the weighted
summation of some Gaussian beams, the synthetic seismic
data at a point on the target layer can be obtained by
weighted summation of the Gaussian beams in the Fresnel
zone of this point. (erven, 1985).

Given the starting, ending and increment values of the
incident angle and azimuth angle, the ray tracing of the
direct wave from the source to the target layer is performed
in the azimuth angle range of 0 to 360 degrees and the
incident angle range of 0 to 90 degrees. These rays
constitute the central ray set. Next the Gaussian beams
corresponding to the target layer can be figured out by
dynamic ray tracing of each central ray using Runge-Kutta
algorithm.

Suppose that a geophone is located at the grid point i
) , , (
i i i
z y x
) , 3 , 2 , 1 ( L = i on the target layer, the seismic record
of this geophone can be obtained by summation of the
Gaussian beams in the Gaussian beams subset. The
Gaussian beams subset consists of the Gaussian beams in
which the distance from the grid point i to the central ray is
less than the half width of the corresponding Gaussian
beam. Finally, the seismic energy or the source side
illumination
i
U at each grid point i can be calculated.

Step 2: seismic Illumination of a source-receiver pair

Illumination analysis of a source-receiver pair consists of
source side and receiver side illumination and relates to
source, receiver and reflection points. If the reflector or the
target layer is a smooth formation boundary, the seismic
wave propagation from the source S will obey the Snell law,
that is, down-going to the reflection point B with incident
angle and then up-going to the point D with reflection
angle . Now given the receiver position R, we want to
calculate the seismic energy at this point as shown in figure
1. In this figure, BM is the normal direction of the reflector
at reflection point B. ( SBM ) is the incident angle of the
down-going ray. BD is the up-going ray which obeys the
Snell law or the Snell up-going ray, and ( DBR ) is the
included angle between the Snell up-going ray BD and the
paraxial asymptotic ray BR .

Suppose that the reflection coefficient at the reflection
point B is ) (
B
K , the down-going wave field energy
emitted from the source S at reflection point B is
S
U , and
the seismic energy after wave propagation from the
reflection point B to the receiver location R is
SBR
U , then
SBR
U can be formulated as:

2
) 1 (cos
=

e K U F U
B S SBR
(1)
The function ) ( F represents the seismic wave energy
variation during seismic wave propagation from B through
the overlying layers to B.
SBR
U can be used as the
illumination of the source-receiver pair <S,R> at the
reflector B in the target layer. In fact, it is difficult to
construct the function ) ( F analytically. According to the
principle of reciprocity which says that the same
seismogram should be recorded if the locations of the
source and geophone are exchanged, the seismic wave
energy recorded at point R and excited at B is equivalent to
the one recorded at B and excited at R if the source energy
is identical. Let
R
U
be the seismic wave energy received at
reflection point B and excited at point R with impulsive
source, we get the following relationship:
2
) 1 (cos


e K U U U
B R S SBR
(2)



Let
SBR
I
be the illumination of the source-receiver pair
<S,R> at the reflector B or the source-receiver pair
illumination, then
SBR
I
can be defined as
2
) 1 (cos
=

e K U U I
B R S SBR
(3)

After calculating the illumination of the source-receiver
pair at each grid point on the target layer according to the
equation (3), we can get the illumination distribution of the
source-receiver pair <S,R> on the whole target layer.

Step 3: Illumination analysis of a seismic geometry

Based on source-receiver pair illumination of all the
reflection points on the target layer, we can derive other
illumination attributes of the target layer from the source-
receiver pair illumination. For example, by summation of
all the source-receiver pair illumination in a gather, we can
get the common shot illumination and the common receiver
illumination, and by summation of all the source-receiver
pair illumination in an offset and/or azimuth range, we can
get the common offset and/or azimuth illumination of

Figure 1: Schematic diagram of the illumination analysis of one
source-receiver pair
B
S
M
R

D
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Gaussian beam based illumination
reflection points on the target layer. In short, given a
seismic geometry and a target layer, we can perform
illumination analysis to optimize the seismic geometry
design using various illumination attributes as shown in
figure 4.

Examples

Figure 2 shows the results of the source side, receiver side
and source-receiver pair illumination corresponding to a
three-dimensional model with one horizontal layer. As
shown in figure 2(b) and (c), the patterns of both the source
side and receiver side illumination are circles. The
strongest illumination is at the centre of the circle and the
strength of the illumination decreases gradually as the
radius increases. Furthermore, the source-receiver pair
illumination exhibits an elliptical pattern as shown in figure
2(d). The major axis of the ellipse links the centers of the
source side and receiver side illumination circles. And in
the centre part of the ellipse, the illumination is stronger
than the other regions. In addition, at the CMP location of
the source-receiver pair, the strongest illumination is
observed, which agrees with the seismic reflection principle.

Figure 3 shows a narrow swath with orthogonal geometry.
This geometrys illumination attributes on the geology
model of figure 2(a) are displayed in figure 4.

Figure 5 shows a complex three-dimensional geology
model and a stack section. The geological model consists of
some steep-dipping faults. A geometry as shown in figure 3
is used to perform seismic modeling based on the Gaussian
beam forward method. After generating all the synthetic
shot gathers, the full three-dimensional seismic data
stacking processing for the synthetic data is performed. The
bottom picture in figure 5 shows the stack section of the
CMP inline No.5 located at the center of the geometry.

Figure 6 and 7 show the comparisons between the stack
sections of the synthetic data and the results of the
Gaussian-beam-based illumination analysis for two given
target layers in the complex three-dimensional model. The
red lines in the stack sections indicate the faults while the
red lines in the illumination results indicate the location of
CMP inline No.5. The pink lines with double arrows in
these figures show the locations of the corresponding points.
It is clear that amplitude variation of these events in the
stack section generally agree with variation of the source-
receiver illumination.

Conclusions

1) The Gaussian-beam-based illumination analysis is more
efficient than the illumination analysis based on the
one-way or two-way wave equation.
2) The source-receiver pair illumination and the other
illumination attributes of a geometry introduced in this
paper are practicable in the seismic survey design.
3) Synthetic data examples show that the illumination
results agree with the corresponding seismic section for
the complex geological model.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Ke Benxi for revising this
paper and the management at BGP for allowing us to
publish this work.




Figure 3: The orthogonal geometry with a swath of 4 lines, 125
shots and 400 channels. Group interval is 50m and line spacing
is 100m.

( a ) ( b )

( c ) ( d )
Figure 2: A three-dimensional model of 10000m*5000m*5000m
with single horizontal layer buried in depth of 4000m, given the
P-wave velocity of the overlying formation as 3000m/s, Vs as
1700m/s, density as 1.5g/cm
3
, those of the underlying formation
are 4500m/s, 2600m/s and 1.5g/cm
3
, source S locates at point
(3500, 2500, 0) and receiver R at point (6500,2500,0). Scan from
0~360 degree horizontally and 0~90 degree perpendicularly,
angular interval is 1 degree. (a) is the model, (b) and (c) are the
energy distribution of the source and the receiver. (d) is the
illumination analysis result of the source-receiver pair.
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Gaussian beam based illumination










Fault
Fault
InLine
No.5
Figure 6: The top figure is the horizontal stack section of inline
No.5 of layer No.5. The bottom figure is the illumination result
of layer No.5, in which each block represents the illumination
result of the slices of the layer shaped by the faults.

( a ) ( b )

( c ) ( d )

( e ) ( f )

Color : illumination values
Figure 4: Illumination attributes of a narrow swath with
orthogonal geometry. (a) and (b) are the number of source-
receiver pairs (NSRP) corresponding to different offsets and
azimuths. (c) is the illumination result of 0~1250m offset range.
(d) is the illumination result of 1250~3000m offset range. (e) is
the illumination result of 230~290 degree azimuth range. (f) is
the illumination result of 140~200 degree azimuth range.

InLine No.5
Figure 7: The top figure is the horizontal stack section of inline
No.5 of layer No.6. The bottom figure is the illumination result
of layer No.6, in which each block represents the illumination
result of the slices of the layer shaped by the faults.

Figure 5: The top figure is a three-dimensional geology model
with six layers. The bottom figure is the horizontal stack section
of inline No.5 which locates in the center of the swath at station
(North: 2525m, East: 1362m to 8612m).
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EDITED REFERENCES
Note: This reference list is a copy-edited version of the reference list submitted by the author. Reference lists for the 2011
SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts have been copy edited so that references provided with the online metadata for
each paper will achieve a high degree of linking to cited sources that appear on the Web.

REFERENCES
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