Elastic wave-mode separation for VTI media

Conclusions

I present a method of obtaining spatially-varying pseudo derivative operators with application to wave mode separation in anisotropic media. The main idea is to utilize polarization vectors constructed in the wavenumber domain using the local medium parameters and then transform these vectors back to the space domain. The main advantage of applying the pseudo derivative operators in the space domain constructed in this way is that they are suitable for heterogeneous media. The wave mode separators obtained using this method are spatially-variable filtering operators and can be used to separate wavefields in VTI media with an arbitrary degree of anisotropy. This methodology is applicable for elastic RTM in heterogeneous anisotropic media.