AVO migration and inversion: Are they commutable?

Abstract

With the increasing ambition of characterizing hydrocarbon traps in more subtle or complex reservoirs, Amplitude Variation with Offset (AVO) techniques are becoming a valuable seismic tool for quantitative seismic discrimination of lithologies and fluids. One of the biggest remaining challenges is to acquire and process the data in an amplitude preserved fashion and in multi-dimensional geology. This study is a component of this puzzle, and attempts to address the following processing question: what are the benefits of prestack migration before AVO inversion (process 1) versus performing an AVO inversion followed by a poststack migration (process 2)? The comparison is done on a 2-D synthetic model which is valid for process 2. The technique used for process 1 is the prestack depth AVO migration/inversion described in the text which estimates reflectivities and incidence angles in multi-dimensions from the data prior to AVO inversion. Process 2 results are derived using a commercial seismic processing software package.