Some Sources of Distortion in Tomographic Velocity IMAGES1

Two particular sources of distortion, which may be encountered when applying tomographic imaging techniques to crosshole seismic data, have been investigated. Errors in survey locations of the shots and receivers can produce significant distortions in the images obtained. A simple method for solving simultaneously for the velocity field and shot and receiver location errors is presented and applied to synthetic and real data. Reflection and refraction of rays at velocity interfaces may produce poor density and angular coverage of the rays within the region of interest. It is shown that the effect of the velocity field on the ray coverage can significantly affect the resolution in the velocity image, even if ray bending is taken into account. One consequence of this effect is that, in some cases, little improvement in image quality is achieved by using curvi-ray rather than straight-ray inversion techniques, despite the occurrence of pronounced ray bending.