Recently, fast marching methods (FMM) beyond first order have been developed for producing rapid solutions to the eikonal equation. In this paper, we present imaging results for 3-D prestack Kirchhoff migration using traveltimes computed using the first-order and second-order FMM on several 3-D prestack synthetic and real data sets. The second order traveltimes produce a much better image of the structure. Moreover, insufficiently sampled first, order traveltimes can introduce consistent errors in the common reflection point gathers that affect velocity analysis. First-order traveltimes tend to be smaller than analytic traveltimes, which in turn affects the migration velocity analysis, falsely indicating that the interval velocity was too low.

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