Migration of dispersive GPR data

Electrical conductivity and dielectric and magnetic relaxation phenomena cause electromagnetic propagation to be dispersive in earth materials. Both velocity and attenuation may vary with frequency, depending on the frequency content of the propagating energy and the nature of the relaxation phenomena. A minor amount of velocity dispersion is associated with high attenuation. For this reason, measuring effects of velocity dispersion in ground penetrating radar (GPR) data is difficult. With a dispersive forward model, GPR responses to propagation through materials with known frequency-dependent properties have been created. These responses are used as test data for migration algorithms that have been modified to handle specific aspects of dispersive media. When either Stolt or Gazdag migration methods are modified to correct for just velocity dispersion, the results are little changed from standard migration. For nondispersive propagating wavefield data, like deep seismic, ensuring correct phase summation in a migration algorithm is more important than correctly handling amplitude. However, the results of migrating model responses to dispersive media with modified algorithms indicate that, in this case, correcting for frequency-dependent amplitude loss has a much greater effect on the result than correcting for proper phase summation. A modified migration is only effective when it includes attenuation recovery, performing deconvolution and migration simultaneously.