Abstract. From the modeling operator, we derive its adjoint operator which is used to migrate 3-D poststack data. It forms a theoretical foundation for the reverse-time migration. The method would be helpful to get a new way to improve the result of conventional reverse-time migration. The inference of the adjoint operator is adaptive to other modeling method including both poststak modeling and prestack modeling. In this paper, we focus on poststack migration for 3-D problems. And the Fourier method for time stepping is discussed. Furthermore, we adopt the numerical software FFTW to perform Fourier transformation, with which the efficiency of the algorithm is greatly improved.