AVP-preserving estimation of reservoir impulse responses

Abstract

Estimating the reservoir properties from surface seismic data for a target below a complex overburden is a challenging problem. One of the approaches is to apply reservoir-oriented local inversion schemes on the redatumed local reflection response. In this paper, we propose a process to estimate the reservoir impulse responses (redatumed reflection response) in a complex overburden setting for realistic data with angledependent or angle vs ray parameter (AVP) characteristics. The impulse responses are estimated using Joint Migration Inversion (JMI) followed by sparsity constrained Proximity Transformation. It comprises a full wavefield approach in the sense that it correctly accounts for all internal multiples and transmission effects. As a result, the estimated impulse responses are free of interference related to internal multiples in the overburden. The process involves a noval procedure to estimate the propagation velocity model using the flexibility in the JMI parameterization. We finally show that this proposed JMI redatuming provides a much more reliable local reflection response, compared to standard redatuming based on time reversal of recorded data.