Local Seismic Discontinuity Detection Based on Wavelet Characteristics

Abstract

Seismic velocity images provide information about the composition, state, and dynamics of Earth’s layers, whereas more detailed waveform studies provide evidence for amplitude and phase distortion, heterogeneity, and local discontinuities in the subsurface. Most tomographic inversions do not incorporate seismic discontinuities, attributing any associated travel time anomalies. This makes seismic inversion techniques difficult to distinguish localized structure anomalies distributed along the ray paths. In this work, an analysis method is developed for the robust and efficient estimation of 3-D seismic local discontinuity detection using wavelet characteristics, which is a measure of local discontinuity. We introduce a new method of local discontinuity detection based on the relations between seismic attributes extracted from wavelet. The scale of the analysis is determined by the type of geological feature that is of interest to the interpreter. By applying this method we obtain a high lateral resolution sections and better discrimination between incoherent and coherent seismic events. Its robustness is demonstrated by synthetic and real data examples on one of Iranian oil fields.