21st Annual Milton B. Dobrin Lecture
March 25, 2015
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Hilton University of Houston
4800 Calhoun Rd., Houston, TX 77004
Speaker: Dr. Christine Krohn
Lecture Title: Technology and Its Impact on Tackling Earth’s Heterogeneity: Success and challenges for model-based geophysics.
There is both an opportunity and a challenge to use model-based processing methods to revolutionize our ability to characterize reservoir properties while incorporating more of the true earth complexity with relaxed acquisition requirements. For the marine case,I will highlight a high-resolution Full Wavefield Inversion (FWI) example demonstrating improved characterization of a highly heterogeneous overburden. Then, I will demonstrate with a number of near-surface examples, the complexity challenge for model-based processing on land. I will start with the Vibroseis source signature and its use for inversion of simultaneous source data. I will then show data examples of unexpectedly large vertical and horizontal variations in velocity and attenuation and their effect on P-waves, S-waves and surface waves. Finally, I will demonstrate the ability of surface-wave tomographic inversion to estimate rapidly varying surface-wave properties and then to predict and remove the complex surface waves, retaining low-frequency reflections, even with highly under-sampled 3D data.
