Prestack reverse time migration （RTM） is an accurate imaging method ofsubsurface media. The viscoacoustic prestack RTM is of practical significance because itconsiders the viscosity of the subsurface media. One of the steps of RTM is solving thewave equation and extrapolating the wave field forward and backward; therefore, solvingaccurately and efficiently the wave equation affects the imaging results and the efficiencyof RTM. In this study, we use the optimal time-space domain dispersion high-order finite-difference （FD） method to solve the viscoacoustic wave equation. Dispersion analysis andnumerical simulations show that the optimal time-space domain FD method is more accurateand suppresses the numerical dispersion. We use hybrid absorbing boundary conditions tohandle the boundary reflection. We also use source-normalized cross-correlation imagingconditions for migration and apply Laplace filtering to remove the low-frequency noise.Numerical modeling suggests that the viscoacoustic wave equation RTM has higher imagingresolution than the acoustic wave equation RTM when the viscosity of the subsurface isconsidered. In addition, for the wave field extrapolation, we use the adaptive variable-lengthFD operator to calculate the spatial derivatives and improve the computational efficiencywithout compromising the accuracy of the numerical solution.
In this paper, first we calculate finite-difference coefficients of implicit finite- difference methods （IFDM） for the first and second-order derivatives on normal grids and first- order derivatives on staggered grids and find that small coefficients of high-order IFDMs exist. Dispersion analysis demonstrates that omitting these small coefficients can retain approximately the same order accuracy but greatly reduce computational costs. Then, we introduce a mirrorimage symmetric boundary condition to improve IFDMs accuracy and stability and adopt the hybrid absorbing boundary condition （ABC） to reduce unwanted reflections from the model boundary. Last, we give elastic wave modeling examples for homogeneous and heterogeneous models to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme.
