Estimation of Q and inverse Q filtering for prestack reflected PP- and converted PS-waves

Multi-component seismic exploration technology, combining reflected PP- and converted PS-waves, is an effective tool for solving complicated oil and gas exploration problems. The improvement of converted wave resolution is one of the key problems. The main factor affecting converted wave resolution is the absorption of seismic waves in overlying strata. In order to remove the effect of absorption on converted waves, inverse Q filtering is used to improve the resolution. In this paper, we present a method to estimate the S-wave Q values from prestack converted wave gathers. Furthermore, we extend a stable and effective poststack inverse Q filtering method to prestack data which uses wave field continuation along the ray path to compensate for attenuation in prestack common shot PP- and PS-waves. The results of theoretical modeling prove that the method of estimating the S-wave Q values has high precision. The results from synthetic and real data prove that the stable inverse Q filtering method can effectively improve the resolution of prestack PP- and PS-waves.