Five ways to avoid storing source wavefield snapshots in 2D elastic prestack reverse time migration

Five alternative algorithms were evaluated to circumvent the excessive storage requirement imposed by saving source wavefield snapshots used for the crosscorrelation image condition in 2D prestack elastic reverse time migration. We compared the algorithms on the basis of their ability, either to accurately reconstruct (not save) the source wavefield or to use an alternate image condition so that neither saving nor reconstruction of full wavefields was involved. The comparisons were facilitated by using the same (velocity-stress) extrapolator in all the algorithms, and running them all on the same hardware. We assumed that there was enough memory in a node to do an extrapolation, and that all input data were stored on disk rather than residing in random-access memory. This should provide a fair and balanced comparison. Reconstruction of the source wavefield from boundary and/or initial values reduced the required storage to a very small fraction of that needed to store source wavefield snapshots for conventional crosscorrelation, at the cost of adding an additional source extrapolation. Reverse time checkpointing avoided recursive forward recomputation. Two nonreconstructive imaging conditions do not require full snapshot storage or an additional extrapolation. Time-binning the imaging criteria removed the need for image time searching or sorting. Numerical examples using elastic data from the Marmousi2 model showed that the quality of the elastic prestack PP and PS images produced by the cost-optimized alternative algorithms were (virtually) identical to the higher cost images produced by traditional crosscorrelation.