Acoustic VTI wave equations and their application for anisotropic reverse‐time migration

Abstract

We present wave equations for modeling and reverse‐time migration in acoustic VTI media, derived directly from Hooke's law and the equations of motion. The resulting set of five first‐order differential equations in the three particle velocity components and two independent stress components involves no approximations apart from the acoustic VTI approximation itself and allows handling variable density in a natural way. We use these equations as the basis for an anisotropic reverse‐time migration implementation, which we demonstrate on a synthetic data example, for which we compare isotropic and anisotropic migration results.