Full wavefield migration, utilizing surface and internal multiple scattering

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Abstract
Traditionally, seismic migration is applied to primary reflection data. This means that events due to multiple scattering (‘multiples’) need be removed prior to the migration process. In this paper, an inversion algorithm is proposed that estimates the angle‐dependent reflection property of each gridpoint in the subsurface (‘gridpoint reflectivity’) by utilizing all seismic events, i.e. primaries, surface‐related multiples and internal multiples. An attractive property of the inversion algorithm is that forward modeling is not required. In that respect it resembles today's migration. However, unlike current migration practice, the proposed inversion algorithm closes the loop and produces a residue that shows how well the image is consistent with the measurements. Actually, the residue may be used for a next iteration, addressing converted waves. We will refer to this data‐driven inversion process for reflectivity as Full Wavefield Migration (FWM).