• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.225-238
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• 2019

Migration velocity analysis (MVA) for creating optimum depth-domain velocities in seismic imaging was applied to marine long-offset multi-channel data, and the effectiveness of the MVA approach was demonstrated by the combinations of conventional data processing procedures. The time-domain images generated by conventional time-processing scheme has been considered to be sufficient so far for the seismic stratigraphic interpretation. However, when the purpose of the seismic imaging moves to the hydrocarbon exploration, especially in the geologic modeling of the oil and gas play or lead area, drilling prognosis, in-place hydrocarbon volume estimation, the seismic images should be converted into depth domain or depth processing should be applied in the processing phase. CMP-based velocity analysis, which is mainly based on several approximations in the data domain, inherently contains errors and thus has high uncertainties. On the other hand, the MVA provides efficient and somewhat real-scale (in depth) images even if there are no logging data available. In this study, marine long-offset multi-channel seismic data were optimally processed in time domain to establish the most qualified dataset for the usage of the iterative MVA. Then, the depth-domain velocity profile was updated several times and the final velocity-in-depth was used for generating depth images (CRP gather and stack) and compared with the images obtained from the velocity-in-time. From the results, we were able to confirm the depth-domain results are more reasonable than the time-domain results. The spurious local minima, which can be occurred during the implementation of full waveform inversion, can be reduced when the result of MVA is used as an initial velocity model.