An efficient wave extrapolation method for anisotropic media with tilt

Wavefield extrapolation operators for elliptically anisotropic media offer significant cost reduction compared with that for the transversely isotropic case, particularly when the axis of symmetry exhibits tilt (from the vertical). However, elliptical anisotropy does not provide accurate wavefield representation or imaging for transversely isotropic media. Therefore, we propose effective elliptically anisotropic models that correctly capture the kinematic behaviour of wavefields for transversely isotropic media. Specifically, we compute source-dependent effective velocities for the elliptic medium using kinematic high-frequency representation of the transversely isotropic wavefield. The effective model allows us to use cheaper elliptic wave extrapolation operators. Despite the fact that the effective models are obtained by matching kinematics using high-frequency asymptotic, the resulting wavefield contains most of the critical wavefield components, including frequency dependency and caustics, if present, with reasonable accuracy. The methodology developed here offers a much better cost versus accuracy trade-off for wavefield computations in transversely isotropic media, particularly for media of low to moderate complexity. In addition, the wavefield solution is free from shear-wave artefacts as opposed to the conventional finite-difference-based transversely isotropic wave extrapolation scheme. We demonstrate these assertions through numerical tests on synthetic tilted transversely isotropic models.