Abstract The New Guinea Limestone Group was deposited across much of New Guinea, including the Indonesian provinces of West Papua and Papua, as part of a widespread shallow-water carbonate platform during the Paleogene and Neogene. This platform was drowned beneath deeper-water strata from the Middle to Late Miocene. Review of biostratigraphic and seismic data from the Aru Basin, offshore New Guinea, reveals a drowning succession c. 600 m thick deposited during a drowning event that lasted around 4 Ma. The objective of this study was to create a well-to-seismic tie from a single well in the study area using biostratigraphic, seismic and log data. The well-to-seismic tie was built to constrain a new velocity model to better image the drowned carbonate platform and understand the reservoir potential of the drowning succession in the zone of interest using two complimentary techniques: seismic reservoir characterization and numerical stratigraphic forward modelling. The well-to-seismic tie was achieved by matching significant biostratigraphic events, such as unconformities, with seismic horizons using stratigraphy-to-seismic. Modern stratigraphic and seismic reservoir characterization techniques, including stratigraphy-to-seismic, numerical forward modelling, velocity model building, rock physics and seismic inversion, were applied to predict rock properties such as lithology and porosity within the drowning succession.