Retrieving Reservoir-only Reflection and Transmission Responses from Target-enclosing Extended Images

Abstract

The Marchenko redatuming approach reconstructs wavefields at depth that contain not only primary reflections, but also multiply-scattered waves. While such fields in principle contain additional subsurface information, conventional imaging approaches cannot tap into the information encoded in internal multiples in a trivial manner. We discuss a new approach that uses the full information contained in Marchenko-redatumed fields, whose output are local reflection and transmission responses that fully enclose a target volume at depth, without contributions from over- or under-burden structures. To obtain the Target-Enclosing Extended Images (TEEIs) we solve a multi-dimensional deconvolution (MDD) problem that can be severely ill-posed, so we offer stable estimates to the MDD problem that rely on the physics of the Marchenko scheme. We validate our method on ocean-bottom field data from the North Sea. In our field data example, we show that the TEEIs can be used for reservoir-targeted imaging using reflection and, for the first time, local transmission responses, shown to be the direct by-product of using internal multiples in the redatuming scheme. Finally, we present local, TEEI-derived reflection and transmission images of the target volume at depth that are structurally consistent with a benchmark image from conventional migration of surface data.