Joint inversion of seismic, vertical seismic profiling, and crosswell data — A case study from China

Abstract

Three-dimensional poststack and prestack seismic inversion results such as P- and S-impedance are commonly used for reservoir characterization. However, the frequency bandwidth of surface-based reflection seismic surveys usually ranges from 10 to 70 Hz, and these surveys have limited vertical resolution. The frequency bandwidth of vertical seismic profiling (VSP) and crosswell data is much wider than that of surface reflection seismic data, and it can give a detailed illumination of the subsurface around the borehole. We test a joint inversion method that integrated surface reflection seismic, VSP, and crosswell data. To better constrain the inversion results, we further integrate a posteriori information on the reflectivity obtained from petrophysics data into the inversion procedure. The a posteriori distribution we use is a modified-Cauchy distribution obtained from the statistical analysis of petrophysics data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm, we applied our inversion strategy to a 2D synthetic model and a real seismic data set, and an uncertainty assessment was also performed. The joint inversion method can detect the thin layers that surface seismic inversion fail to, demonstrating the higher resolution of the method.