AVP-preserving Estimation of Reservoir Impulse Responses

Abstract

Summary Estimating the reservoir properties from surface seismic data for a target below a complex overburden is a challenging problem. One of the approaches is to apply reservoir-oriented local inversion schemes on the redatumed local reflection response. In this paper, we propose a process to estimate the reservoir impulse responses (redatumed reflection response) in a complex overburden setting for realistic data with angle-dependent or angle vs ray parameter (AVP) characteristics. The impulse responses are estimated using Joint Migration Inversion (JMI) followed by sparsity constrained Proximity Transformation. It comprises a full wavefield approach in the sense that it correctly accounts for all internal multiples and transmission effects. As a result, the estimated impulse responses are free of interference related to internal multiples in the overburden. The process involves a noval procedure to estimate the propagation velocity model using the flexibility in the JMI parameterization. We finally show that this proposed JMI redatuming provides a much more reliable local reflection response, compared to standard redatuming based on time reversal of recorded data.