Automatic WEMVA by Focusing Subsurface Offset Virtual Sources

Macro velocity building is important for subsequent prestack depth migration and full waveform inversion. Wave equation migration velocity analysis (WEMVA) utilizes band-limited waveform to invert the velocity in an automatic manner. Normally, inversion would be implemented by focusing the subsurface offset common image gathers(SOCIGs). We re-examine it with a different perspective and propose to view the SOCIGs and the background wavefield together as subsurface offset virtual sources(SOVS). A linear system connecting the perturbation of the position of those SOVS and velocity is derived and solved subsequently using a conjugate gradient method. Both synthetic and real dataset examples verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.