Efficient depth extrapolation of waves in elastic isotropic media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a computationally efficient method for seismic wave extrapolation in elastic isotropic media, enabling faster modeling of pressure and shear waves and potentially integrating into standard seismic workflows.

Contribution

It presents a novel factorization-based technique that reduces elastic modeling costs, improving efficiency over existing time- and frequency-domain methods.

Findings

Significant reduction in computational cost.

Effective modeling of both pressure and shear waves.

Potential integration into seismic processing workflows.

Abstract

We propose a computationally efficient technique for extrapolating seismic waves in an arbitrary isotropic elastic medium. The method is based on factorizing the full elastic wave equation into a product of pseudo-differential operators. The method extrapolates displacement fields, hence can be used for modeling both pressure and shear waves. The proposed method can achieve a significant reduction in the cost of elastic modeling compared to the currently prevalent time- and frequency-domain numeric modeling methods and can contribute to making multicomponent elastic modeling part of the standard seismic processing work flow.