An approach to compensate for attenuation effects in reverse-time migration

Strong attenuation anomalies can significantly lower the resolution of the seismic image in reduced amplitude, shifted phase, and frequency content loss. To overcome these attenuation effects thus improve the image resolution, in this study, I report a method to compensate for attenuation effects in reverse-time migration. Because attenuation effects include amplitude loss and velocity dispersion, to compensate for attenuation effects needs to take care of both. Unfortunately, conventional viscoacoustic/elastic modeling is difficult to be used for such the attenuation compensation. In contrast, I show that it is easy to implement attenuation compensation in a novel viscoacoustic wave equation by reversing the sign of the absorption operator and leaving the sign of the dispersion operator unchanged. By testing this method in several synthetic examples, I believe that the proposed attenuation compensated imaging approach is promisingly helpful to improve the resolution of seismic images.