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Illumination studies of targets in complex geologies is a central aspect in survey design, structural imaging and reservoir characterization, and require more accurate algorithms that properly describe the physical properties of wave propagation. Conventionally, illumination and resolution studies for survey design involve ray-based methods, and although they capture properly properties of simpler earth models, they suffer from severe limitations in accuracy in complex regions. Earlier work (Lapilli et al., 2010) introduced a method for target-oriented illumination studies where wave propagation accurately models the wavefield properties, and target-oriented illumination maps are constructed through local decomposition of synthetic seismograms. This target-oriented method presents a reduced modeling cost when compared to an illumination study where given acquisition geometries are fully modeled and migrated to obtain the imaged amplitudes at a selected target. This work presents results of a target-oriented wave illumination study constructed for presurvey analysis of a full azimuth acquisition geometry over a deep-water subsalt target. The resulting illumination map is compared with the predicted illumination maps of both a fully synthesized and depth migrated target amplitude map and ray-based amplitude map. Shot weights describing the contribution of energy to imaging a given target are also computed, results demonstrate these weights are more stable and adequate for amplitude studies as compared to ray-based results.

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