3D common-reflection-surface stack and kinematic wavefield attributes

Abstract

Dissatisfaction with the resolution of time-domain images and poststack-migrated sections obtained by conventional processing directed a lot of effort in prestack migration methods and also led to new time-domain imaging techniques (Hubral, 1999). The common-reflection-surface (CRS) stack belongs to these new methods. It has been demonstrated that (a) the CRS stack produces high-resolution time-domain sections (Hubral, 1999) and (b) posstack depth migration of CRS stacked sections may be considered as an alternative to prestack depth migration in difficult areas and, as shown by Trappe et al. (2001), can lead to better results than prestack depth migration. The objective of this article is mainly to show two things. First, we present zero-offset (ZO) sections obtained by the 3D CRS stack from the first ever application of the 3D CRS stack on a real 3D land data set of industrial dimension. Simulated ZO sections for the same data set obtained by NMO/DMO/stack are shown for comparison. Secondly, we introduce the seismic attributes gained by the CRS stack which are extracted from the multicoverage prestack data by coherence analysis. These new “CRS attributes” open the way to many seismic applications, some of which are indicated in this article. In the seismic world, numerous attributes and also a range of classifications for seismic attributes exist. All aim at assisting the interpretation of seismic data. The attributes obtained by the CRS stack are time-derived attributes. In the CRS-related literature, they are also often referred to as kinematic wavefield attributes or wavefront attributes because the CRS attributes are associated with wavefronts of two so-called hypothetical waves. When simulating ZO sections from prestack data, these two wavefronts belong to the normal-incidence-point (NIP) and the normal (N) waves propagating from the bottom to the top along the ZO ray which hits the reflector perpendicularly in case of an …