The basic components of residual migration in VTI media using anisotropy continuation

We introduce anisotropy continuation as a process which relates changes in seismic images to perturbations in the anisotropic medium parameters. This process is constrained by two kinematic equations, one for perturbations in the normal-moveout (NMO) velocity and the other for perturbations in the dimensionless anisotropy parameter η. We consider separately the case of post-stack migration and show that the kinematic equations in this case can be solved explicitly by converting them to ordinary differential equations using the method of characteristics. When comparing the results of kinematic analytical computations with synthetic numerical experiments confirms the theoretical accuracy of the method.