RTM of a distributed acoustic sensing VSP at the CaMI Field Research Station, Newell County, Alberta, Canada

Jorge E. Monsegny, Daniel O. Trad, Donald C. Lawton

We applied a reverse time migration (RTM) algorithm to distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data from a walkaway vertical seismic profiling (VSP) acquisition at the CaMI Field Research Station at Newell County, Alberta, Canada. The RTM algorithm used a system of coupled first degree differential equations for pressure, vertical and horizontal particle velocities. As DAS data measurements are usually strain rate, we transformed them to vertical particle velocity before the RTM algorithm back propagated them. We tested the techniques of Daley et al. (2016) and Bna et al. (2017) to do this transformation. We also tested the RTM with the original DAS data. Apart from a polarity reversal, there were no important differences between the different RTM tests. In addition, we migrated geophone data from the same VSP acquisition for comparison and found a similar imaging quality.