Efficient viscoacoustic modeling and reverse time migration with Q-compensation using finite-difference operators

Efficient modeling of seismic wave propagation in attenuating media is essential for seismic imaging and inversion. As seismic waves travel through the Earth’s subsurface, they show dissipation and dispersion effects, which may degrade imaging accuracy if these effects are neglected. To characterize wave propagation in attenuating media, decoupled fractional viscoacoustic wave equations have been established. However, solving these equations numerically requires computationally expensive Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operations, limiting their applicability to large-scale industrial problems. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes a cost-effective viscoacoustic wave equation with decoupled dissipation and dispersion effects, incorporating explicit Qbased on the nearly constant Qmodel. The new equation can be efficiently solved using the finite-difference method. Using this wave equation as the forward modeling engine, we implement an efficient Q-compensated reverse time migration (RTM) for viscoacoustic media. Numerical tests demonstrate that the proposed wave equation offers higher computational efficiency than the decoupled fractional viscoacoustic wave equations. Furthermore, Q-compensated RTM effectively corrects both amplitude loss and phase dispersion.