Three-dimensional supervirtual seismic refraction interferometry: A case study in western Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The semiautomatic seismic refraction supervirtual interferometry (SVI) algorithm has been developed to improve the conventional SVI method. The conventional SVI method uses convolution techniques and involves the raw trace, which reintroduces noise back into the enhanced trace. However, the semiautomatic method uses a first-arrival reference picked from a raw trace to compute the arrival times of all enhanced virtual traces. The semiautomatic SVI method has been extended recently from 2D to 3D geometry and applied on a synthetic 3D seismic data set using the raw traces of only one inline. We have developed a case study of the semiautomatic 3D SVI method by applying the algorithm on an active seismic refraction data set that consists of 82,944 raw traces from 288 shot gathers that use an accelerated weight drop source. Due to possible differences in the source wavelet among shots, the semiautomatic 3D SVI method is applied on the 288 raw traces from each shot gather separately. The SVI technique generates 41,328 distinct correlograms from one shot, which results in the production of a trace with a much better signal-to-noise ratio.