Structurally Constrained Initial Impedance Modeling for Poststack Seismic Inversion

Abstract

The establishment of initial subsurface model is a crucial step for seismic inversion. An accurate and reasonable initial model can mitigate the ill-posedness of seismic inversion and improve the quality of inversion result. A common method for building initial model is the well-log data interpolation. However, the traditional well-log interpolation method ignores the structural information of the subsurface, resulting in the constructed initial model lacking geological meaning. We propose a novel structurally constrained modeling method (SCMM) to obtain a geologically reasonable initial impedance model for poststack seismic inversion. Well-log interpolation can be represented as an inverse problem. SCMM constrains the inversion process by using a regularization operator that forces the well-log data to be extended to the entire seismic working area along the subsurface local structural direction. First, we calculate the seismic dip from the poststack seismic profile. Then, we design the structural operator based on the estimated seismic dip information to constrain the interpolation process. Under the framework of inversion, the interpolation objective function can be established by combining the structural operator with the well-log data misfit term, and it can be solved efficiently by the conjugate gradient algorithm. Synthetic and field data tests show that the initial model built by SCMM is more consistent with the geological rules than that built by traditional method, and the poststack impedance inversion using SCMM is better than that using traditional modeling method in terms of convergence property and accuracy of inversion result.