Geophysical Tutorial: The function of interpolation

Abstract

When interpreting seismic or well data in desktop software, it's easy to forget that the data are discretely sampled in space and time. Even when you look at an apparently continuous log curve, there are really only samples, typically every 0.1524 m (6 inches). When you display seismic data as wiggle traces, there are perhaps samples only every 2 or 4 ms in the time dimension. Some software lets you turn off the interpolation so you can see the discrete data samples, as in Figure 1a .