Controlled-source interferometric redatuming by crosscorrelation and multidimensional deconvolution in elastic media

Various researchers have shown that accurate redatuming of controlled seismic sources to downhole receiver locations can be achieved without requiring a velocity model. By placing receivers in a horizontal or deviated well and turning them into virtual sources, accurate images can be obtained even below a complex near-subsurface. Examples...

Laboratory measurements and theoretical modeling of seismoelectric interface response and coseismic wave fields

A full-waveform seismoelectric numerical model incorporating the directivity pattern of a pressure source is developed. This model provides predictions of coseismic electric fields and the electromagnetic waves that originate from a fluid/porous-medium interface. An experimental setup in which coseismic electric fields and interface responses...

Estimation of changes in saturation and pressure from 4D seismic AVO and time-shift analysis

A reliable estimate of reservoir pressure and fluid saturation changes from time-lapse seismic data is difficult to obtain. Existing methods generally suffer from leakage between the estimated parameters. We propose a new method using different combinations of time-lapse seismic attributes based on four equations: two expressing changes in...

Seismic interferometry using multidimensional deconvolution and crosscorrelation for crosswell seismic reflection data without borehole sources

Crosswell reflection method is a high-resolution seismic imaging method that uses recordings between boreholes. The need for downhole sources is a restrictive factor in its application, for example, to time-lapse surveys. An alternative is to use surface sources in combination with seismic interferometry. Seismic interferometry (SI) could...

Methodology for dense spatial sampling of multicomponent recording of converted waves in shallow marine environments

A widespread use of converted waves for shallow marine applications is hampered by spatial aliasing and field efficiency. Their short wavelengths require dense spatial sampling which often needs to be achieved by receivers deployed on the seabed. We adopted a new methodology where the dense spatial sampling is achieved in the common-receiver...

Tutorial on seismic interferometry: Part 1 — Basic principles and applications

Seismic interferometry involves the crosscorrelation of responses at different receivers to obtain the Green's function between these receivers. For the simple situation of an impulsive plane wave propagating along the x-axis, the crosscorrelation of the responses at two receivers along the x-axis gives the Green's function of the direct wave...

Tutorial on seismic interferometry: Part 2 — Underlying theory and new advances

In the 1990s, the method of time-reversed acoustics was developed. This method exploits the fact that the acoustic wave equation for a lossless medium is invariant for time reversal. When ultrasonic responses recorded by piezoelectric transducers are reversed in time and fed simultaneously as source signals to the transducers, they focus at the...

Exact expression for the effective acoustics of patchy-saturated rocks

Seismic effects of a partially gas-saturated subsurface have been known for many years. For example, patches of nonuniform saturation occur at the gas-oil and gas-water contacts in hydrocarbon reservoirs. Open-pore boundary conditions are applied to the quasi-static Biot equations of poroelasticity to derive an exact analytic expression of the...

On seismic interferometry, the generalized optical theorem, and the scattering matrix of a point scatterer

We have analyzed the far-field approximation of the Green's function representation for seismic interferometry. By writing each of the Green's functions involved in the correlation process as a superposition of a direct wave and a scattered wave, the Green's function representation is rewritten as a superposition of four terms. When the...

Estimation of primaries and near-offset reconstruction by sparse inversion: Marine data applications

ost wave-equation-based multiple removal algorithms are based on prediction and subtraction of multiples. Especially for shallow water, the prediction strongly relies on a correct interpolation of the missing near offsets. The subtraction of predicted multiples from the data can easily lead to the distortion of primaries if primaries and...

Ray-based stochastic inversion of prestack seismic data for improved reservoir characterization

Trace inversion for reservoir parameters is affected by angle averaging of seismic data and wavelet distortion on the migration image. In an alternative approach to stochastic trace inversion, the data are inverted prestack before migration using 3D dynamic ray tracing. This choice makes it possible to interweave trace inversion with Kirchhoff...

The concept of double blending: Combining incoherent shooting with incoherent sensing

Seismic surveys are designed so that the time interval between shots is sufficiently large to avoid temporal overlap between records. To economize on survey time, the current compromise is to keep the number of shots to an acceptable minimum. The result is a poorly sampled source domain. We propose to abandon the condition of nonoverlapping shot...

Estimating and correcting the amplitude radiation pattern of a virtual source

In the virtual source (VS) method we crosscorrelate seismic recordings at two receivers to create a new data set as if one of these receivers were a virtual source and the other a receiver. We focus on the amplitudes and kinematics of VS data, generated by an array of active sources at the surface and recorded by an array of receivers in a...

Assessing estimated velocity-depth models: Finding error bars in tomographic inversion

In conventional migration velocity analysis methods, a velocity model is estimated that results in flattened events in common-image gathers. However, after this process, no information is available on the accuracy of this velocity model. A statistical analysis of velocity-model parameters is very difficult because of the integrated nature of the...

Application of a linear finite-frequency theory to time-lapse crosswell tomography in ultrasonic and numerical experiments

Time-lapse seismic monitoring is the geophysical discipline whereby multiple data sets recorded at the same location but at different times are used to locate and quantify temporal changes in the elastic parameters of the subsurface. We validate a time-lapse monitoring method by crosswell tomography using two types of wavefield-modeling...

The dynamics of statics

The statics problem, whether short wavelength, long wavelength, residual, or trim, has always been one of the more time-consuming and problematic steps in seismic data processing. We routinely struggle with issues such as poor signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, cycle skipping, truncated refractors, wavelets with ambiguous first arrival times, etc....

A new iterative solver for the time-harmonic wave equation

The time-harmonic wave equation, also known as the Helmholtz equation, is obtained if the constant-density acoustic wave equation is transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain. Its discretization results in a large, sparse, linear system of equations. In two dimensions, this system can be solved efficiently by a direct method. In...