Evaluation of parsimonious two-dimensional Kirchhoff and reverse-time prestack depth migrations of seismic data from the Western Canadian Basin

Parsimonious migration is a type of Kirchhoff migration that reduces the amount of ray tracing required by estimating the incident angle for each reflection; ray tracing is then performed only along the specific predetermined arrival directions and is embedded in the migration. Parsimonious migration is applied to land data from the Western Canadian Basin. The rugged topography and the exposure of the high velocity carbonate rocks provide a challenging test example. Since parsimonious migration is the fastest migration now available, we compare it's results, in terms of speed and quality, with those of reverse-time migration which should produce a high quality image for this type of complicated structure. Correction of estimated ray incident directions for topography, and using the topography as the datum for migration, significantly improves the quality of the parsimonious migration image.