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References
The technical journals, especially The Leading Edge, are the best sources of material.
Kearey, P., Brooks, M., and Hill, I., 2002, An introduction to geophysical exploration. 3rd
edition, Blackwell Publishing, 262p.
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LECTURE 1
3
Introduction to Geophysics
What Is Problem Number One?
In case you had not noticed, the basic problem is
that most rocks are opaque!
As a result, we have several alternatives to finding
out what is lurking below the surface.
We can use guesswork.
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the
Big
Picture
first
with
What Is Geophysics?
Geophysics uses the methods of classical physics to obtain a
geophysical image of the subsurface.
For every standard physical property, there is a corresponding
geophysical technique.
For example:
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Seismic Structure
Receiver
Source
RESERVOIR ROCK
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Note
Although depth-related, information can
usually be recovered, with its accuracy
considerably less than that achieved with
boreholes or Seismic methods, which
map vertical variations.
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minimal
in-
Insensitive to vegetation.
Can be recycled many times.
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We can think of the Fresnel zone as a disc with the reflection point at its center.
Energy being reflected from inside the disk adds up to provide the recorded event
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on the seismic trace
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Summary
Geophysical methods provide a cost effective
method for imaging the subsurface.
Better geophysical images Better geological
models More successful exploration &
production.
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ongoing
comparisons
with
LECTURE 2
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Reservoir Management
The decision to develop a new field offshore, or a
deep play onshore, or a field in a remote location
requires accurate appraisals of oil and gas in
place, potential production rates, and ultimate
recovery.
If developed, economic pressures further require
that these high-cost fields be brought on stream
quicker and that RECOVERY BE INCREASED.
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Development Strategies
Development strategies must meet five basic objectives:
1. Reduce the cost of field development, which often translates into
minimizing the number of wells.
2. Optimize total reserves.
3. Optimize production recovery.
4. Reduce operating costs of the developed field.
5. Enhance recovery if economically justified.
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()
.
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LECTURE 3
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Raypaths-1
We can define raypaths as the path of a very
small interval of the wavefront.
Raypaths can be viewed as the seismic
equivalent of a laser beam.
While seismic raypaths DO NOT really exist,
nevertheless, they can be extremely useful
for visualizing many seismic phenomena.
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Raypaths-2
Seismic Waves
Seismic waves can be categorized into;
(i) body waves, which propagate throughout the
subsurface, and
(ii) surface waves, which usually propagate in the
weathered layer.
Body waves can be further categorized into P-waves,
and S-waves. Currently, the vast majority of seismic
surveys use only the P-wave energy.
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P-Waves
Relatively easy to generate.
The seismic velocity of P-waves is a function of
both the rock matrix and the fluids within.
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S-Waves
=
Shear waves can be generated with either special Swave sources, or as a by product of P-wave sources.
Frequently, 60+% of the output of P-wave vibrators can
produce S-waves.
Since fluids cannot support shearing, the S-wave velocity
is only affected by the rock matrix and not the presence
of any fluids.
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P-Waves vs S-Waves
The measurement of both P- and S-wave
velocities provides a means of separating the
effects of the rock matrix (e.g. porosity) from the
fluids.
P-wave results can however be essentially
useless where there are gas chimneys, because
of the severe attenuation of the P-wave energy.
In such cases, S-wave surveys are used, because
S-waves are not affected.
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Multiples
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Improved illumination
Subsurface image is often improved through wide
azimuth illumination, multicomponent technology
offers a cost effective means of acquiring such
data in an offshore environment.
Patch design
Swath design
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Surface Waves
Rayleigh waves
Love waves
Rayleigh waves shake the ground both in the direction of propagation and
perpendicular (in a vertical plane) so that the motion is generally elliptical
either prograde or retrograde.
Love waves shake the ground perpendicular to the direction of propagation
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and generally parallel to the Earths surface.
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As a result, the seismic reflections are defocused, in much the same way that frosted
glass de-focuses the image through a window.
The first arrival refraction data provides one
source of information for defining and in turn,
for correcting for the effects of the weathered
layer.
Static corrections
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LECTURE 4
83
Effects at Interfaces
1 Snells law
2 Zoeppritz equations
3 Mode conversion (PS)
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Wavefronts at Interfaces
When a seismic wavefront encounters an
interface between rocks with different seismic
properties, three effects can occur.
1 There can be a change in direction of the
wavefront. This effect is described with
Snells law.
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Snells Law 1
When a seismic wavefront encounters an interface
between rocks with different seismic velocities at
an angle, there can be a change in direction of the
wavefront.
Why? Because different parts of the wavefront are
traveling at different velocities.
In general, Snells law only applies where there are
plane interfaces.
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Snells Law 2
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Snells Law 3
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2.5 tonnes/m3
2.16 tonnes/m3
2.29 tonnes/m3
2.33 tonnes/m3
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Mode Conversion
There is more mode conversion beyond the critical
angle.
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Incident P
V1
V2 > V1
Refracted P
Refracted S
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LECTURE 5
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Seismic Sources
1 Dynamite.
2 Vibroseis.
3 Air-guns.
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Vibroseis Sources
Vibroseis sources are low
power units which achieve
high energy levels by
vibrating the ground over
several seconds.
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Vibroseis Sources
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Air-guns Introduction
These create a seismic signal through the rapid
discharge of compressed air at 2000 psi into the
water. It is an environmentally friendly alternative to
explosives.
Air-guns generate an oscillating bubble pulse in
addition to the primary pulse.
Arrays of many air-guns of various sizes are used
to cancel the bubble pulse and to improve signalto-noise ratios.
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Air-guns Operation
Marine seismic surveys use air-guns to send out
the seismic signal. An air-gun works by releasing
air under high pressure (140 bar) into the water.
The air-gun is towed, usually
in an array with other guns,
5-15m depth behind the ship.
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Air-Gun Signatures
Air-guns are typically 10 to 20 cm in diameter and
from 10 in3 to 500 in3 in size. Usually, operating air
pressure is 2000 psi and guns are deployed at
depth of 5-15 m.
Signature consists of (1) direct arrival from air-gun
ports, (2) ghost or reflection from surface of the
water, and (3) the bubble pulses produced by the
expansion-collapse of the air bubble.
Signature is given by strength and bubble period.
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Output of air-guns
3 3
+
5
6
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Air-Gun Arrays
The signature of a single air-gun is unsatisfactory,
because it is too weak to produce good signal-to-noise
ratios at large target depths, and because the bubble
pulses are difficult to remove with deconvolution.
Both problems can be overcome with tuned air-gun
arrays in which many guns of different carefully selected
volumes are fired simultaneously.
Arrays improve the primary-to-bubble ratio (PBR). Arrays
can have up to 100 air-guns, but 25-50 is more typical.
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Signature Measurement
Sound pressure created by a single airgun is inversely proportional to the
distance.
If the source signature is measured close
to the array, the signal is found to be very
distorted. This is because the influence of
the individual airgun is too big.
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Water
re 1 Pa
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Comments
Hearing threshold
Office environment
Feeling threshold
Pain threshold
Damage threshold
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170 db re 1 Pa @ 1m
Fishing trawler
150 160 db
Air-gun arrays
210 250 db
1 kg explosives
270 db
Sperm whales
200 - 225 db
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Air-guns on Mammals
Air-gun design, underwater acoustics, animal
behavior, and marine mammal physiology are
complex subjects and interactions between them
are even more complex.
Can interpret the same data in quite different
ways, eg, whales breeching.
Escaping or enjoying?
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Marine Acquisition
Arrays
1 Receiver arrays
2 Source arrays
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Receiver Arrays
In the days of analogue recording,
ground roll could often over-power
reflections.
Therefore, receiver arrays were
employed mainly to attenuate ground
roll.
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Processing NMO
Below is an example of a CMP-gather. The
figure shows that increasing the shot-receiver
distance, increases the travel-time.
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Aliasing
Source Arrays
Source arrays achieve much the same as receiver
arrays.
Source arrays are common with Vibroseis
sources, in order to:
(i) increase signal into the ground and in turn,
signal-to-noise ratios and
(ii) attenuate ground roll.
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Arrays A Summary
Arrays for sources and more commonly
receivers have seen extensive use as a
means of reducing ground roll, and
spatial aliasing.
Receiver arrays are most effective when
they are of a comparable length to the
wavelength of the ground roll.
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LECTURE 6
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A CMP Gather
The raypaths for a single CMP
gather cover a range of source-toreceiver offsets.
Can you
equivalent?
visualize
lens
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LECTURE 7
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Noise
1 Coherent noise
2 Random noise
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What Is Noise?
Noise is everything other than primary
reflections, also known as single bounce
reflections.
Noise can be coherent, such as multiple
reflections. Often multiples can be strong in
marine surveys with reverberations in the
water column.
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Multiple Reflections
Multiples can be generated
in many ways.
Multiples constitute one of
the principal sources of
noise with many seismic
operations.
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Random Noise
Noise can be random, such as wind noise, cultural
noise from infrastructure, vehicles, boats, etc.
Random noise such as wind noise, streamer noise
or sea noise is usually monitored during
acquisition.
When the noise levels rise above the contractually
agreed levels, acquisition is usually stopped. In
many cases, slashing or rolling the vegetation can
reduced the effects of wind.
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Scattered Noise
Scattered noise or diffractions are common in
rocks like carbonates.
Often, scattered noise is signal which belongs
somewhere else, rather than in the plane of
the seismic section.
When in doubt, filtering it out can be a
common approach.
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Noise A Summary
Noise is everything other than primary reflections, also
known as single bounce reflections.
Noise can be coherent, such as multiple reflections.
Often multiples can be as strong as primaries, as in
marine surveys with reverberations in the water column.
With land operations, ground roll or surface waves,
especially with surface energy sources are another major
source of coherent noise.
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LECTURE 8
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Amplitudes
All seismic systems currently in use have 24bit recording and therefore, they have
sufficient dynamic range to record every
seismic signal.
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MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical-system)
receivers have greater dynamic range
than the standard geophone.
Spherical Divergence
The major cause of the dramatic variations in
seismic amplitudes down the seismic record
is spherical divergence.
This results from the apparent loss of energy
from a wave as it spreads during travel.
Spherical divergence decreases energy with
the square of the distance
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Before
After
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Amplitudes A Summary
Seismic amplitudes can exhibit very large dynamic
range, often > 96 db, largely because of geometric
spreading.
Current 24 bit acquisition systems with 144 db of
dynamic range are adequate to record most
seismic signals.
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Quiz 8
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LECTURE 9
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Datum Statics
In marine seismic, the sea surface
defines a datum for further processing.
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Deconvolution cont
It also removes reverberations, Improves
bandwidth, sharpens wavelets and removes
multiples.
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Migration cont
Migration is more correctly known as
imaging. We plot the reflectors below the
CMP. Migration moves the reflections updip to their correct position.
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Migration - Application
Migration:
(i) repositions reflections to their correct place in the
subsurface.
(ii) unscrambles complex reflections.
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Filtered
Migrated
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Depth Migration
Migration in the time domain can be
ineffective, where there are large velocity
changes, such as where salt pillows
occur.
In such circumstances, migration in the
depth domain is required.
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Examples of muting
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Summary
Seismic data processing aims to convert
to field data into an image of the
subsurface.
The volumes of data can be staggering,
and one aim of the processing stage is to
reduce the amount of data to manageable
and practical sizes.
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Quiz 9
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LECTURE 10
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Marine Systems
Known as ocean-bottom cables (OBC), uses
four component (4C) receivers three
component velocity geophones and one
hydrophone. Often buried in the sea floor.
Use pop-up buoys at the end
of each line to interface with
recording equipment in shallow
waters (<1000 ft).
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OBC System
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Flat Spots
The standard exploration approach seeks
to find structural or stratigraphic targets
which are favorable for hydrocarbon
accumulations.
However, it is possible to directly detect
hydrocarbons under certain conditions,
especially in younger sediments.
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A flat spot can indicate a gas-oil, gaswater, or oil-water interface, with the
reflection coefficient for the last interface
being substantially lower than that of
each of the others.
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Bright Spots
The amplitudes of the reflected and
transmitted signals are described by the
Zoeppritz equations.
These equations are quite complex, but
simplify considerably at normal incidence.
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+ 2
=
4
+ 3
0.5
1
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2 2 1 1
=
2 + 2.25 2 1 2
2 2 + 1 1
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2 2 1 1
2 1
=
2 +
2 2 + 1 1
1 0.5 2 + 1
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DHI A Summary
Gas-liquid contacts can be recognized as flat spots.
The large reductions in seismic velocities and densities
with gas sands can produce high amplitudes or bright
sands with young sediments.
With older sediments, the occurrence of gas is detected
with AVO which is a measure of the change in Poissons
ratio.
Most current methods of seismic inversion include the
AVO response and invert for P and S wave velocities and
density.
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LECTURE 11
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Land Acquisition
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Cross-well seismic
Detailed understanding of reservoir flow and
barrier architecture is crucial to optimizing
hydrocarbon recovery.
Cross-well seismic, that is using seismic sources in
a wellbore and recording the wave propagation in
another wellbore has the potential of giving highresolution images of features like faults,
unconformities, sequence porosity and fracturing.
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4D Seismic
The acquisition of 4D or time-lapse
seismic has opened new horizons for
monitoring reservoir properties such as
fluids, temperature, saturation and
pressure changes during the productive
life of a field.
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be
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Seismic Processing
Seismic technology has achieved amazing
achievements in exploration and production
activities in the past few decades.
What we record in the acquisition stage is
called raw seismic data, which contains real
signals, together with noise and multiples.
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Amplitude losses
Seismic amplitude losses are caused by
three major factors:
1. Geometrical spreading.
2. Intrinsic attenuation.
3. Transmission losses.
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Amplitude recovery
This stage attempts to correct for amplitude losses
that are unrelated to the reflection coefficient, such
as; wave attenuation and source variations.
Both: Deterministic and Statistical approaches are
used.
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Deterministic approach:
A popular deterministic model is the t-square model,
where the data is multiplied by 2 (t being the two-way
travel-time).
It is based on the following assumptions:
Multiplication with t to compensate for geometrical
spreading.
An attenuation model of the type where the total
losses are given as an integration over all frequencies.
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Statistical approach:
Automatic gain control (AGC) is the most common class of
routines.
They are based on these principles:
Let denote the amplitude at time-sample number i (i.e.
corresponding to time = ) of a seismic trace.
Introduce a tie-window of length 2 + 1 and compute the
weighted amplitude value around this sample point.
1
=
2 + 1
+ ,
=
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Raw data to the left and amplitude recovered data to the right
employing AGC.
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Correlation
Cross-correlation is a measure of the similarity or
linearity between two waveforms.
Cross-correlation involves:
(1) cross-multiplication of the individual waveforms, and
summation of the cross-multiplication products over
the common time interval.
(2) progressively sliding one waveform past the other
and, for each time shift of lag, summing the crossmultiplication products.
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Vibroseis Correlation
Cross correlation of the sweep signal with the
field recording generates an output similar to
an impulsive source, such as dynamite.
The correlated pulse is a symmetrical zero
phase Klauder wavelet.
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Correlation
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Autocorrelation
Autocorrelation is applied to compress the wavelet and to
attenuate multiples.
Autocorrelation is the cross-correlation of a signal with
itself. Informally, it is the similarity between observations
as a function of the time lag between them. It is a
mathematical tool for finding repeating patterns, such as
the presence of a periodic signal obscured by noise.
It is often used in signal processing for analyzing
functions or series of values, such as time domain
signals.
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Autocorrelation Cont
Convolution
Suppose we need to determine the response
of a system, such as a stereo system, to an
input, such as a track from an audio CD, the
input can be viewed as a series of impulses
which;
(i) are separated by the digitizing interval
and
(ii) are scaled by the amplitude of the signal.
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of
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Deconvolution
This is a technique that can compress the
source signature and eliminate multiples
is applied after sorting the data into CMP
gathers.
Deconvolution and Convolution are different sides
of the same coin.
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Where,
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Examples of muting
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2 0 +
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Effect of reflector dip on the reflection point. When the reflector is flat (top) the CMP is a
common reflection point. When the reflector dips (bottom) there is no CMP. A dipping
reflector may require changes in survey parameters, because reflections may involve more
distant sources and receivers than reflection from a flat layer
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A velocity model.
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In time migration, the images are displayed in twoway travel times, and wave-field extrapolation is
done in a time stepping way.
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LECTURE 12
345
Seismic Resolution
Seismic resolution is the ability to distinguish
separate features, the minimum distance
between two features, so that the two can be
defined separately rather than as one.
The limit of seismic resolution usually makes
us wonder, how thin a bed can we see?
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Horizontal Resolution
The horizontal dimension of seismic resolution is
described by the Fresnel zone.
The Fresnel zone is a frequency
and range dependent area of a
reflector from which, most of the
energy of a reflection is returned
and arrival times differ by less than
half a period from the first break.
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Remember, V/fc,
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Vertical Resolution
Vertical resolution is the ability to separate
two features that are close together. A
seismic wave can be considered as a
propagating energy pulse.
If such a wave is being reflected from the top
and the bottom of a bed, the result will
depend on the interaction of closely spaced
pulses.
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361
for
the
dominant
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Seismic Interpretation
Seismic data are studied by geoscientists to
interpret the composition, fluid content, extent
and geometry of rocks in the subsurface.
Interpretation of seismic data will be based on
an integrated use of seismic inlines,
crosslines, time slices and horizon attributes.
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END
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