AVO Inversion

Elastic impedance modeling and inversion from angle band cubes

AVO inversion is carried out through the following steps:

1. Decomposition of CIP/CMP gathers into common incidence, angle trace cubes

   Options exist for hyperbolic moveout, high-order moveout with the third and fourth Taner-Koehler expansion terms, anisotropic with modifications of Alkalifah's time- and space-variant eta term, and ray tracing options. Structural dip is used in estimating the incidence angles if inline and crossline dip fields are input.

2. Generation of primary AVO attributes from prestack P-wave, reflection angle gathers

   Prestack moveout-corrected P-wave data in the form of common angle gathers provide the input. AVO quality control (QC) attributes can be generated consisting of the modeled AVO and residual noise traces.

3. Calculation of secondary AVO attributes

   Computed from the primary AVO attributes

4. Calculation of joint AVO attributes

   Estimates of primary AVO attributes from common angle gathers can also be made using Aki & Richard's approximation to the Knott-Zoeppritz' equations. It can use both PP and converted PS data jointly (or separately) in the inversion from seismic amplitudes into AVO attributes.

5. Parallelization of ISIS suite of reservoir characterization technology with AVO simultaneous inversion

   Inverting seismic data to extract rock properties is becoming much more common as part of the exploration, development, and production cycle. Integrating seismic processing and seismic inversion into an iterative loop has also been shown to be a very powerful way of optimizing the quality of the seismic data for accurate prediction of rock properties.

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