Inversion of seismic reflection data through focusing

Inversion of seismic reflection data through focusing

Mulder, W.A.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Geoscience & Engineering

2012-09-10

Since most of the easy hydrocarbon reservoirs have been found, accurate sub-surface imaging for oil and gas exploration and production is crucial. Seismic data can provide a band-limited reconstruction of impedance contrasts between different rock formations as well as a subsurface velocity model. Current compute power allows for the use of the full acoustic wave equation for seismic imaging and processing. Least-squares data fitting is an obvious approach but may provide the wrong answer because of local minima in the cost function caused by the absence of low frequencies in the data. An alternative formulation is based on extended images that invokes action at distance to make up for errors in the estimated subsurface velocity model. The action at distance is accomplished by a subsurface shift and the correct model should focus amplitudes at zero shift. The related cost function penalizes image amplitudes at non-zero shift. It has a large basin of attraction but loses its sharpness closer to the minimum. A new formulation is proposed – motivated by high-frequency asymptotic analysis – that provides better results on synthetic and real seismic data and is less sensitive to imaging artifacts.

seismic inversion
acoustics
imaging
subsurface characterization

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:10f803df-5f7c-44c5-9925-e386f31f0c69

Vienna University of Technology

978-3-9502481-9-7

ECCOMAS 2012: Proceedings of the 6th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, Vienna, Austria, 10-14 September 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 The Author(s)