P-wave complex-valued traveltimes in homogeneous attenuating transversely isotropic media

Computation of complex-valued traveltimes provides an efficient approach to describe the seismic wave attenuation for applications like attenuation tomography, inverse Q filtering and Kirchhoff migration with absorption compensation. Attenuating acoustic transverse isotropy can be used to describe the directional variation of velocity and attenuation of P-waves in thin-bedding geological structures. We present an approximate method to solve the acoustic eikonal equation for an attenuating transversely isotropic medium with a vertical symmetry axis. We take into account two similar parameterizations of an attenuating vertical symmetry axis medium. The first parameterization uses the normal moveout velocity, whereas the second parameterization uses the horizontal velocity. For each parameterization, we combine perturbation theory and the Shanks transform in different ways to derive analytic solutions. Numerical examples show that the analytic solutions derived from the second parameterization yield better accuracy. The Shanks transform solution with respect to only the anellipticity parameter from the second parameterization is demonstrated numerically to be the most accurate among all the analytic solutions.