Simulation and Processing Seismic Data in Complex Geological Models

Abstract:

Seismic simulations in complex geological models are interesting to verify some limitations of seismic data. In this project, different geological models were designed to analyze some difficulties encountered in the interpretation of seismic data. Another idea is these data become available for LENEP/UENF students to test new tools to assist in seismic data processing.

The geological models were created considering some characteristics found in oil exploration. We simulated geological medium with volcanic intrusions, salt domes, fault, pinch out and layers more distante from surface (Kanao, 2012).

We used the software Tesseral Pro to simulate the seismic acquisitions. The acquisition geometries simulated were of the type common offset, end-on and split-spread. (Figure 1)

Data acquired with constant offset require less processing routines. The processing flow used with tools available in Seismic Unix package (for more details, see Pennington et al., 2005) was geometric spreading correction, deconvolution, attenuation correction and post-stack depth migration. In processing of the data acquired with end-on and split-spread geometries, we included velocity analysis and NMO correction routines.

Although we analyze synthetic data and carefully applied each processing routine, we can observe some limitations of the seismic reflection in imaging thin layers, great surface depth layers, layers with low impedance contrast and faults.