A high-efficiency Q-compensated pure-viscoacoustic reverse time migration for tilted transversely isotropic media

The attenuation and anisotropy characteristics of real earth media give rise to amplitude loss and phase dispersion during seismic wave propagation. To address these effects on seismic imaging, viscoacoustic anisotropic wave equations expressed by the fractional Laplacian have been derived. However, the huge computational expense associated with multiple Fast Fourier transforms for solving these wave equations makes them unsuitable for industrial applications, especially in three dimensions. Therefore, we first derived a cost-effective pure-viscoacoustic wave equation expressed by the memory-variable in tilted transversely isotropic (TTI) media, based on the standard linear solid model. The newly derived wave equation featuring decoupled amplitude dissipation and phase dispersion terms, can be easily solved using the finite-difference method (FDM). Computational efficiency analyses demonstrate that wavefields simulated by our newly derived wave equation are more efficient compared to the previous pure-viscoacoustic TTI wave equations. The decoupling characteristics of the phase dispersion and amplitude dissipation of the proposed wave equation are illustrated in numerical tests. Additionally, we extend the newly derived wave equation to implement Q-compensated reverse time migration (RTM) in attenuating TTI media. Synthetic examples and field data test demonstrate that the proposed Q-compensated TTI RTM effectively migrate the effects of anisotropy and attenuation, providing high-quality imaging results.