Numerical simulations of a seismic wavefield are important to analyze seismic wave propagation. Elastic-wave equations are used in data simulation for modeling migration and imaging. In elastic wavefield numerical modeling, the rotated staggered-grid method (RSM) is a modification of the standard staggered-grid method (SSM). The variable-order method is based on the method of variable-length spatial operators and wavefield propagation, and it calculates the real dispersion error by adapting different finite-difference orders to different velocities. In this study, the variable-order rotated staggered-grid method (VRSM) is developed after applying the variable-order method to RSM to solve the numerical dispersion problem of RSM in low-velocity regions and reduce the computation cost. Moreover, based on theoretical dispersion and the real dispersion error of wave propagation calculated with the wave separation method, the application of the original method is extended from acoustic to shear waves, and the calculation is modified from theoretical to time-varying values. A layered model and an overthrust model are used to demonstrate the applicability of VRSM. We also evaluate the order distribution, wave propagation, and computation time. The results suggest that the VRSM order distribution is reasonable and VRSM produces high-precision results with a minimal computation cost.
Most of the carbonates in the Tarim Basin in northwest China are low-porosity and low-permeability rocks. Owing to the complexity of porosity in carbonates, conventional rock- physics models do not describe the relation between velocity and porosity for the Tarim Basin carbonates well. We propose the porous-grain-upper-boundary (PGU) model for estimating the relation between velocity and porosity for low-porosity carbonates. In this model, the carbonate sediments are treated as packed media of porous elastic grains, and the carbonate pores are divided into isolated and connected pores The PGU model is modified from the porous-grain-stiff-sand (PGST) model by replacing the critical porosity with the more practical isolated porosity. In the implementation, the effective elastic constants of the porous grains are calculated by using the differential effective medium (DEM) model. Then, the elastic constants of connected porous grains in dry rocks are calculated by using the modified upper Hashin-Shtrikman bound. The application to the Tarim carbonates shows that relative to other conventional effective medium models the PGU model matches the well log data well.
The attenuation of prestack internal multiples based on virtual seismic events is computationally costly and hinders seismic data processing. We propose a multiples attenuation method for poststack seismic data by approximating conventional virtual events. The proposed method is iterative. The proposed method is tested using 2D synthetic and the field poststack seismic datasets. Compared with the conventional virtual events method, the proposed method does not require data regularization and offers higher computation efficiency. The method requires to know the travel time of the primary reflection waves. The results of the application to 2D field datasets suggest that the proposed method attenuates the internal multiples while highlighting the deep primaries.