Nonstationary seismic–well tying with time-varying wavelets

Abstract

Seismic–well tying is an important technique for correlating well-logging curves in depth with seismic traces in time. An appropriate seismic–well tying technique must account for two types of nonstationarity: the nonstationary time errors in the synthetic seismic trace caused by the inaccurate time–depth relationship established based on sonic-logging velocity and the nonstationary seismic signals due to the time-varying wavelets during wave propagation. The nonstationary problems related to the time–depth relationship and the time-varying wavelets are interrelated in seismic-well tying procedure. We implemented a nonstationary seismic–well tying method by iteratively updating the time-depth relationship and estimating the time-varying wavelets. From the estimated time-varying wavelets, we also estimated a Q-value by assuming that the subsurface medium has a constant Q at depth and used the constant Q to constrain the variation of the seismic wavelet during propagation. Then, we used the improved time–depth relationship and time-varying wavelets with the Q constraint for further iterations. In the iterative procedure, we quantified the accuracy of the seismic–well tying result using the correlation coefficient between the synthetic and the true seismic trace in each iteration and evaluated the reliability using the normalized mean-square errors among the wavelets estimated in different iterations.