Effective anisotropy through traveltime and amplitude matching

Introducing anisotropy to seismic wave propagation reveals more realistic physics of our Earth's subsurface as compared to the isotropic assumption. However wavefield modeling, the engine of seismic inverse problems, in anisotropic media still suffers from computational burdens, in particular with complex anisotropy such as transversely isotropic (TI) and Orthorhombic anisotropy. We develop effective isotropic velocity and density models to package the effects of anisotropy such that the wave propagation behavior using these effective models approximate those of the original anisotropic model. We build these effective models through the high frequency asymptotic approximation based on the eikonal and transport equations. We match the geometrical behavior of the wavefields, given by traveltimes, from the anisotropic and isotropic eikonal equations. This matching yields the effective isotropic velocity that approximates the kinematics of the anisotropic wavefield. Equivalently, we calculate the effective densities by equating the anisotropic and isotropic transport equations. The effective velocities and densities are then fed into the isotropic acoustic variable density wave equation to obtain cheaper anisotropic wavefields. We justify our approach by testing it on an elliptical anisotropic model. The numerical results demonstrate a good matching of both traveltime and amplitude between anisotropic and effective isotropic wavefields.