The optimizied expansion method for wavefield extrapolation

Spectral methods are fast becoming an indispensable tool for wave-field extrapolation, especially in anisotropic media, because of its dispersion and artifact free, as well as highly accurate, solutions of the wave equation. However, for inhomogeneous media, we face difficulties in dealing with the mixed space-wavenumber domain operator.In this abstract, we propose an optimized expansion method that can approximate this operator with its low rank representation. The rank defines the number of inverse FFT required per time extrapolation step, and thus, a lower rank admits faster extrapolations. The method uses optimization instead of matrix decomposition to find the optimal wavenumbers and velocities needed to approximate the full operator with its low rank representation.Thus,we obtain more accurate wave-fields using lower rank representation, and thus cheaper extrapolations. The optimization operation to define the low rank representation depends only on the velocity model, and this is done only once, and valid for a full reverse time migration (many shots) or one iteration of full waveform inversion. Applications on the BP model yielded superior results than those obtained using the decomposition approach. For transversely isotopic media, the solutions were free of the shear wave artifacts, and does not require that eta>0.