Band-limited ray tracing

ABSTRACT We develop a new ray‐tracing method, namely, band‐limited ray tracing, which aims to overcome some of the limitations of standard high‐frequency ray tracing in complex velocity models that contain complex interfaces. Band‐limited ray tracing is based on the Kirchhoff integral representation of the transmitted wavefield. In our discussion we consider the Kirchhoff integral for the acoustic wave equation, however, our method can be extended to the Kirchhoff integral for the elastic wave equation. When compared to finite‐difference wave propagation, the new method captures the wave kinematics more accurately than conventional ray tracing while staying within the ray‐tracing framework, without requiring processing or alteration to the original model. We present the theory of band‐limited ray tracing and demonstrate its capability. We compare the Kirchhoff migration examples obtained using conventional ray‐tracing and band‐limited ray‐tracing methods. Our synthetic example demonstrates that band‐limited ray tracing provides better results than conventional ray tracing, especially in estimating wavefronts. In the case of the real data example, the results are comparable to each other while presenting different focusing characteristics. The different focusing characteristics indicate the necessity of performing a full model building workflow for an extended evaluation on real data application.