An efficient wave extrapolation method for tilted orthorhombic media using effective ellipsoidal models

The wavefield extrapolation operator for ellipsoidally anisotropic (EA) media offers significant cost reduction compared to that for the orthorhombic case, especially when the symmetry planes are tilted and/or rotated. However, ellipsoidal anisotropy does not provide accurate focusing for media of orthorhombic anisotropy. Therefore, we develop effective EA models that correctly capture the kinematic behavior of the wavefield for tilted orthorhombic (TOR) media. Specifically, we compute effective source-dependent velocities for the EA model using kinematic high-frequency representation of the TOR wavefield. The effective model allows us to use the cheaper EA wavefield extrapolation operator to obtain approximate wavefield solutions for a TOR model. Despite the fact that the effective EA models are obtained by kinematic matching using high-frequency asymptotic, the resulting wavefield contains most of the critical wavefield components, including the frequency dependency and caustics, if present, with reasonable accuracy. The methodology developed here offers a much better cost versus accuracy tradeoff for wavefield computations in TOR media, particularly for media of low to moderate complexity. We demonstrate applicability of the proposed approach on a layered TOR model.