Frequency-Domain Reverse-Time Migration with Analytic Green’s Function for the Seismic Imaging of Shallow Water Column Structures in the Arctic Ocean

Seismic oceanography can provide a two- or three-dimensional view of the water column thermocline structure at a vertical and horizontal resolution from the multi-channel seismic dataset. Several seismic imaging methods and techniques for seismic oceanography have been presented in previous research. In this study, we suggest a new formulation of the frequency-domain reverse-time migration method for seismic oceanography based on the analytic Green’s function. For imaging thermocline structures in the water column from the seismic data, our proposed seismic reverse-time migration method uses the analytic Green’s function for numerically calculating the forward- and backward-modeled wavefield rather than the wave propagation modeling in the conventional algorithm. The frequency-domain reverse-time migration with analytic Green’s function does not require significant computational memory, resources, or a multifrontal direct solver to calculate the migration seismic images as like conventional reverse-time migration. The analytic Green’s function in our reverse-time method makes it possible to provide a high-resolution seismic water column image with a meter-scale grid size, consisting of full-band frequency components for a modest cost and in a low-memory environment for computation. Our method was applied to multi-channel seismic data acquired in the Arctic Ocean and successfully constructed water column seismic images containing the oceanographic reflections caused by thermocline structures of the water mass. From the numerical test, we note that the oceanographic reflections of the migrated seismic images reflected the distribution of Arctic waters in a shallow depth and showed good correspondence with the anomalies of measured temperatures and calculated reflection coefficients from each XCDT profile. Our proposed method has been verified for field data application and accuracy of imaging performance.