Effects of wrong adjoints for RTM in TTI media

In order to obtain accurate images of the subsurface, anisotropic modeling and imaging is necessary. However, the twenty-one parameter complete wave-equation is too computationally expensive to be of use in this case. The transverse tilted isotropic wave-equation is then the next best feasible representation of the physics to use for imaging. The main complexity arising from transverse tilted isotropic imaging is to model the receiver wavefield (back propagation of the data or data residual) for the imaging condition. Unlike the isotropic or the full physics wave-equations, the transverse tilted isotropic wave-equation is not not self-adjoint. This difference means that time-reversal will not model the correct receiver wavefield and this can lead to incorrect subsurface images. In this work, we derive and implement the adjoint wave-equation to demonstrate the necessity of exact adjoint modeling for anisotropic modeling and compare our result with adjoint-free time-reversed imaging.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SEG/2018/loubout...