Waveform presentation of seismic traces by a parallel algorithm

Abstract

Seismic traces are the records of sonic wave reflections from underground. These traces can be primarily characterized by amplitude, phase, and frequency content of a given time instance at a surface bin location. Many times these attributes and their variations bear information about lithology, fluid content, and geologic structure. It is therefore a focus of many seismic interpretations. Seismic traces are generally displayed in either variable density or wiggle format. In variable density, a seismic amplitude of a given time instance at a trace is mapped to a gray scale, and a seismic section or faces of a seismic volume become images. The amplitude‐to‐gray mapping can be further extended to amplitude‐to‐color‐table. Variable density is also a commonly used presentation for seismic traces. It is perhaps the best format to reveal the abnormalities of seismic amplitude and to depict the underground structure on a section or in a volume. On the other hand, visualization of seismic traces in the form of wiggles, the most venerable method of seismogram display, is perhaps the best presentation for amplitude, phase, and frequency content, and it is a widely used visualization format on seismic interpretation workstations. Today, compared to variable density presentation, wiggles are currently more costly to produce for 2D sectional visualization and impractical for 3D perspective visualizations. In this abstract, we present a parallel algorithm for producing wiggles from seismic traces. Combined with massive parallelization of a video hardware, the algorithm produces the wiggles at the same cost as the variable density for both 2D sectional view and a 3D perspective view.