Patent ID: 7872943

Claim:
A method of accounting for angle-dependent wavelet stretch in seismic data, said method comprising: obtaining seismic data by imparting acoustic rays of known amplitude and frequency at one or more locations into the earth and then detecting, with a receiver, reflected and refracted acoustic rays at one or more surface locations wherein accounting for angle-dependent stretch preserves high frequency data for creating a subsurface image, applying to the seismic data an operator that relates wavelet stretch to the cosine of a wavelet reflection angle, wherein the operator directly relates a wavelet stretch factor to the cosine of the wavelet reflection angle, and wherein the wavelet stretch factor is expressed in the time domain as: ∂ t ∂ τ ⁢  x wherein ∂τ is the vertical time difference between two seismic events at an offset distance of zero and ∂t is the vertical time difference between the two seismic events at an offset distance of x, wherein said applying of the operator includes using the operator to account for angle-dependent wavelet stretch in a forward modeling process.