A NEW APPROACH TO PRE-STACK SEISMIC PROCESSING

Pre-stack processing of seismic reflection data is significantly simpl ified if the data organization is the same as that in which the data w ere acquired in the field; that is, in time slices through common-sour ce gathers. For an impulsive source, the entire processing stream redu ces to two elements: velocity analysis and reverse-time pre-stack migr ation. Many of the steps that are applied as independent operations in standard processing (including demultiplexing, sorting into common-mi dpoint gathers, elevation corrections, near-surface velocity static co rrections, first break muting, ground roll removal, and both normal an d dip move-out corrections) either are eliminated, or are applied impl icitly during migration. This approach is ideally suited to parallel p rocessing, and can be implemented in machines with small processor mem ories.