2D and 3D potential-field upward continuation using splines

The dominant upward‐continuation technique used in the potential‐field geophysics industry is the fast Fourier transform (FFT) technique. However, the spline‐based upward‐continuation technique presented in this paper has some advantages over the FFT technique. The spline technique can be used to carry out level‐to‐uneven surface 2D and 3D potential‐field upward continuation. An example of level‐to‐uneven surface upward continuation of 3D magnetic data using the spline technique is shown, and it is evident that the continued anomalies are very close to the theoretical values. The spacing can be irregular. Synthetic examples using the spline technique to continue noise‐contaminated gravity and magnetic data upward to an altitude of 15 km on irregular grids are shown. Gaussian noise with a zero mean and a standard deviation of 1% does not cause much error and can readily be tolerated. Through comparison with the FFT technique, it is found that for low‐altitude gravity and magnetic upward continuation, both the FFT technique and the spline technique are suitable; for high‐altitude upward continuation, the FFT technique is inaccurate, whereas the spline technique works very well. Also, upward continuation by the spline technique has a smaller edge effect than upward continuation by the FFT technique. The spline‐based upward continuation technique works fairly well even when the periphery of a grid is not quiet: it is rather robust in general. A real example shows that the spline technique can be employed to perform upward continuation of total‐field magnetic data and to de‐emphasize near‐surface noise.     

An alternative approach in establishing relation between vertical and horizontal gradients of 2D potential field

The relation in which the vertical and horizontal gradients of potential field data measured along a profile across a two‐dimensional source are a Hilbert transform pair is re‐established using complex domain mathematics. In addition, a relation between the measured field and its vertical gradient in terms of a closed‐form formula is also established. The formula is based on hypersingular or Hadamard's finite‐part integral. To estimate the vertical gradient directly from the field data, Linz's algorithm of computing Hadamard's finite‐part integral is implemented. Numerical experiments are conducted on synthetically generated total magnetic intensity data with a mild level of noise contamination. A model of a magnetically polarised vertical thin sheet buried at a finite depth within a non‐magnetic half‐space was considered in generating the synthetic response. The results from numerical experiments on the mildly noise‐contaminated synthetic response are compared with those from using classical Fourier and robust regularised Hilbert transform‐based techniques.     

Large‐scale 3D inversion of potential field data

Inversion of gravity and/or magnetic data attempts to recover the density and/or magnetic susceptibility distribution in a 3D earth model for subsequent geological interpretation. This is a challenging problem for a number of reasons. First, airborne gravity and magnetic surveys are characterized by very large data volumes. Second, the 3D modelling of data from large‐scale surveys is a computationally challenging problem. Third, gravity and magnetic data are finite and noisy and their inversion is ill posed so regularization must be introduced for the recovery of the most geologically plausible solutions from an infinite number of mathematically equivalent solutions. These difficulties and how they can be addressed in terms of large‐scale 3D potential field inversion are discussed in this paper. Since potential fields are linear, they lend themselves to full parallelization with near‐linear scaling on modern parallel computers. Moreover, we exploit the fact that an instrument’s sensitivity (or footprint) is considerably smaller than the survey area. As multiple footprints superimpose themselves over the same 3D earth model, the sensitivity matrix for the entire earth model is constructed. We use the re‐weighted regularized conjugate gradient method for minimizing the objective functional and incorporate a wide variety of regularization options. We demonstrate our approach with the 3D inversion of 1743 line km of FALCON gravity gradiometry and magnetic data acquired over the Timmins district in Ontario, Canada. Our results are shown to be in good agreement with independent interpretations of the same data.     

Application of randomized sampling schemes to curvelet‐based sparsity‐promoting seismic data recovery

Reconstruction of seismic data is routinely used to improve the quality and resolution of seismic data from incomplete acquired seismic recordings. Curvelet‐based Recovery by Sparsity‐promoting Inversion, adapted from the recently‐developed theory of compressive sensing, is one such kind of reconstruction, especially good for recovery of undersampled seismic data. Like traditional Fourier‐based methods, it performs best when used in conjunction with randomized subsampling, which converts aliases from the usual regular periodic subsampling into easy‐to‐eliminate noise. By virtue of its ability to control gap size, along with the random and irregular nature of its sampling pattern, jittered (sub)sampling is one proven method that has been used successfully for the determination of geophone positions along a seismic line. In this paper, we extend jittered sampling to two‐dimensional acquisition design, a more difficult problem, with both underlying Cartesian and hexagonal grids. We also study what we term separable and non‐separable two‐dimensional jittered samplings. We find hexagonal jittered sampling performs better than Cartesian jittered sampling, while fully non‐separable jittered sampling performs better than separable jittered sampling. Two other 2D randomized sampling methods, Poisson Disk sampling and Farthest Point sampling, both known to possess blue‐noise spectra, are also shown to perform well.     

Analytical model for fully three‐dimensional radial dispersion in a finite‐thickness aquifer

Analytical solutions for contaminant transport in a non‐uniform flow filed are very difficult and relatively rare in subsurface hydrology. The difficulty is because of the fact that velocity vector in the non‐uniform flow field is space‐dependent rather than constant. In this study, an analytical model is presented for describing the three‐dimensional contaminant transport from an area source in a radial flow field which is a simplest case of the non‐uniform flow. The development of the analytical model is achieved by coupling the power series technique, the Laplace transform and the two finite Fourier cosine transform. The developed analytical model is examined by comparing with the Laplace transform finite difference (LTFD) solution. Excellent agreements between the developed analytical model and the numerical model certificate the accuracy of the developed model. The developed model can evaluate solution for Peclet number up to 100. Moreover, the mathematical behaviours of the developed solution are also studied. More specifically, a hypothetical convergent flow tracer test is considered as an illustrative example to demonstrate the three‐dimensional concentration distribution in a radial flow field. The developed model can serve as benchmark to check the more comprehensive three‐dimensional numerical solutions describing non‐uniform flow contaminant transport. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The iteration method for downward continuation of a potential field from a horizontal plane

This paper introduces an iteration method for the downward continuation of potential‐field data from a horizontal plane, and compares it with the conventional frequency‐domain method (Fourier transform) using 2D and 3D model tests. The paper evaluates the two methods in terms of the results, i.e. downward‐continuation distance and stability. The iteration method proves to be more stable and able to downward continue the potential for a greater distance than the Fourier transform method.     

3D高阶抛物Radon变换地震数据保幅重建

本文结合传统3D抛物Radon变换（PRT）和AVO数据正交多项式拟合,给出了3D高阶抛物Radon变换方法（HOPRT）.该变换增加了描述AVO数据变化的梯度信息和曲率信息,拓展了传统3D抛物Radon变换方法,使其在具有AVO特征的数据重建中具有更高的准确度,从而提高AVO分析的可靠性.文中给出了3D高阶抛物Radon变换进行地震数据保幅重建的流程.理论模型和实际地震资料的重建结果显示了本文方法的优点.     

2D地震数据规则化中随机稀疏采样方案

地震数据规则化是地震信号处理中一个重要步骤,近年来受到广泛关注的压缩感知技术已经被应用到地震数据规则化中。压缩感知技术突破了传统的Shannon-Nyqiust采样定理的限制,可以用采集的少量地震数据重构完整数据。基于压缩感知技术的地震数据规则化质量主要受三个因素影响,除了受地震信号在不同变换域的稀疏表达和11范数重构算法的影响外,极大地取决于地震道随机稀疏采样方式。尽管已有学者开展了2D地震数据离散均匀分布随机采样方式研究,但设计新的稀疏采样方案仍然很有必要。在本文中,我们提出满足Bernoulli分布规律的Bernoulli随机稀疏采样方式和它的抖动形式。对2D数值模拟数据进行四种随机稀疏采样方案和两种变换（Fourier变换和Curvelet变换）实验,对获取的不完整数据应用11范数谱投影梯度算法（SPGL1）进行重构。考虑到不同随机种子点产生不同约束矩阵R会有不同的规则化质量,对每种方案和每个稀疏采样因子进行10次规则化实验,并计算出相应信噪比（SNR）的平均值和标准偏差。实验结果表明,我们提出的新方案好于或等于已有的离散均匀分布采样方案。     

Solving the complex near‐surface problem using 3D data‐driven near‐surface layer replacement

In many land seismic situations, the complex seismic wave propagation effects in the near‐surface area, due to its unconsolidated character, deteriorate the image quality. Although several methods have been proposed to address this problem, the negative impact of 3D complex near‐surface structures is still unsolved to a large extent. This paper presents a complete 3D data‐driven solution for the near‐surface problem based on 3D one‐way traveltime operators, which extends our previous attempts that were limited to a 2D situation. Our solution is composed of four steps: 1) seismic wave propagation from the surface to a suitable datum reflector is described by parametrized one‐way propagation operators, with all the parameters estimated by a new genetic algorithm, the self‐adjustable input genetic algorithm, in an automatic and purely data‐driven way; 2) surface‐consistent residual static corrections are estimated to accommodate the fast variations in the near‐surface area; 3) a replacement velocity model based on the traveltime operators in the good data area (without the near‐surface problem) is estimated; 4) data interpolation and surface layer replacement based on the estimated traveltime operators and the replacement velocity model are carried out in an interweaved manner in order to both remove the near‐surface imprints in the original data and keep the valuable geological information above the datum. Our method is demonstrated on a subset of a 3D field data set from the Middle East yielding encouraging results.     

Earthquake soil‐structure interaction of nuclear power plants,differences in response to 3‐D, 3 × 1‐D,and 1‐D excitations

In soil‐structure interaction modeling of systems subjected to earthquake motions, it is classically assumed that the incoming wave field, produced by an earthquake, is unidimensional and vertically propagating. This work explores the validity of this assumption by performing earthquake soil‐structure interaction modeling, including explicit modeling of sources, seismic wave propagation, site, and structure. The domain reduction method is used to couple seismic (near‐field) simulations with local soil‐structure interaction response. The response of a generic nuclear power plant model computed using full earthquake soil‐structure interaction simulations is compared with the current state‐of‐the‐art method of deconvolving in depth the (simulated) free‐field motions, recorded at the site of interest, and assuming that the earthquake wave field is spatially unidimensional. Results show that the 1‐D wave‐field assumption does not hold in general. It is shown that the way in which full 3‐D analysis results differ from those which assume a 1‐D wave field is dependent on fault‐to‐site geometry and motion frequency content. It is argued that this is especially important for certain classes of soil‐structure systems of which nuclear power plants subjected to near‐field earthquakes are an example.     

Numerical modeling of 3D fully nonlinear potential periodic waves

A simple and exact numerical scheme for long-term simulations of 3D potential fully nonlinear periodic gravity waves is suggested. The scheme is based on the surface-following nonorthogonal curvilinear coordinate system. Velocity potential is represented as a sum of analytical and nonlinear components. The Poisson equation for the nonlinear component of velocity potential is solved iteratively. Fourier transform method, the second-order accuracy approximation of vertical derivatives on a stretched vertical grid and the fourth-order Runge–Kutta time stepping are used. The scheme is validated by simulation of steep Stokes waves. A one-processor version of the model for PC allows us to simulate evolution of a wave field with thousands degrees of freedom for hundreds of wave periods. The scheme is designed for investigation of nonlinear 2D surface waves, generation of extreme waves, and direct calculations of nonlinear interactions.     

3D F–K and finite-difference dip moveout in cross-spreads

A 3D F–K dip-moveout (DMO) is developed, which is applicable to data acquired in an elementary single-fold cross-spread. The key idea is that a 3D log-stretch transform and the inherent regularity of the cross-spread geometry make it possible to transform 3D Fourier DMO. The derived theory generalizes the 2D Fourier shot-gather DMO in the log-stretch domain; 2D turns out to be a special case. Similarly to 2D, the cross-spread DMO becomes convolutional after multidimensional logarithmic stretch. The proposed method works for orthogonal and slanted acquisition geometries; the cross-spread DMO relationships are found to be independent of the intersection angle of the shot and receiver lines. In contrast to integral (Kirchhoff-style) methods, the cross-spread F–K DMO does not degrade from the inevitable irregularity in 3D sampling of offsets in a CMP gather. The newly derived F–K DMO operator can be approximated by finite-difference (FD) schemes; the low-order FD cross-spread DMO equation is shown to be the 3D extension of the Bolondi and Rocca offset continuation. It is shown that F–K and low-order FD operators are effective in a synthetic case.     

Wavefield interpolation in 3D large‐step Fourier wavefield extrapolation

Extrapolating wavefields and imaging at each depth during three‐dimensional recursive wave‐equation migration is a time‐consuming endeavor. For efficiency, most commercial techniques extrapolate wavefields through thick slabs followed by wavefield interpolation within each thick slab. In this article, we develop this strategy by associating more efficient interpolators with a Fourier‐transform‐related wavefield extrapolation method. First, we formulate a three‐dimensional first‐order separation‐of‐variables screen propagator for large‐step wavefield extrapolation, which allows for wide‐angle propagations in highly contrasting media. This propagator significantly improves the performance of the split‐step Fourier method in dealing with significant lateral heterogeneities at the cost of only one more fast Fourier transform in each thick slab. We then extend the two‐dimensional Kirchhoff and Born–Kirchhoff local wavefield interpolators to three‐dimensional cases for each slab. The three‐dimensional Kirchhoff interpolator is based on the traditional Kirchhoff formula and applies to moderate lateral velocity variations, whereas the three‐dimensional Born–Kirchhoff interpolator is derived from the Lippmann–Schwinger integral equation under the Born approximation and is adapted to highly laterally varying media. Numerical examples on the three‐dimensional salt model of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists/European Association of Geoscientists demonstrate that three‐dimensional first‐order separation‐of‐variables screen propagator Born–Kirchhoff depth migration using thick‐slab wavefield extrapolation plus thin‐slab interpolation tolerates a considerable depth‐step size of up to 72 ms, eventually resulting in an efficiency improvement of nearly 80% without obvious loss of imaging accuracy. Although the proposed three‐dimensional interpolators are presented with one‐way Fourier extrapolation methods, they can be extended for applications to general migration methods.     

2D acoustic‐elastic coupled waveform inversion in the Laplace domain

Although waveform inversion has been intensively studied in an effort to properly delineate the Earth's structures since the early 1980s, most of the time‐ and frequency‐domain waveform inversion algorithms still have critical limitations in their applications to field data. This may be attributed to the highly non‐linear objective function and the unreliable low‐frequency components. To overcome the weaknesses of conventional waveform inversion algorithms, the acoustic Laplace‐domain waveform inversion has been proposed. The Laplace‐domain waveform inversion has been known to provide a long‐wavelength velocity model even for field data, which may be because it employs the zero‐frequency component of the damped wavefield and a well‐behaved logarithmic objective function. However, its applications have been confined to 2D acoustic media. We extend the Laplace‐domain waveform inversion algorithm to a 2D acoustic‐elastic coupled medium, which is encountered in marine exploration environments. In 2D acoustic‐elastic coupled media, the Laplace‐domain pressures behave differently from those of 2D acoustic media, although the overall features are similar to each other. The main differences are that the pressure wavefields for acoustic‐elastic coupled media show negative values even for simple geological structures unlike in acoustic media, when the Laplace damping constant is small and the water depth is shallow. The negative values may result from more complicated wave propagation in elastic media and at fluid‐solid interfaces. Our Laplace‐domain waveform inversion algorithm is also based on the finite‐element method and logarithmic wavefields. To compute gradient direction, we apply the back‐propagation technique. Under the assumption that density is fixed, P‐ and S‐wave velocity models are inverted from the pressure data. We applied our inversion algorithm to the SEG/EAGE salt model and the numerical results showed that the Laplace‐domain waveform inversion successfully recovers the long‐wavelength structures of the P‐ and S‐wave velocity models from the noise‐free data. The models inverted by the Laplace‐domain waveform inversion were able to be successfully used as initial models in the subsequent frequency‐domain waveform inversion, which is performed to describe the short‐wavelength structures of the true models.     

Multistep inversion workflow for 3D long‐offset damped elastic waves in the Fourier domain

We present a new workflow for imaging damped three‐dimensional elastic wavefields in the Fourier domain. The workflow employs a multiscale imaging approach, in which offset lengths are laddered, where frequency content and damping of the data are changed cyclically. Thus, the inversion process is launched using short‐offset and low‐frequency data to recover the long spatial wavelength of the image at a shallow depth. Increasing frequency and offset length leads to the recovery of the fine‐scale features of the model at greater depths. For the fixed offset, we employ (in the imaging process) a few discrete frequencies with a set of Laplace damping parameters. The forward problem is solved with a finite‐difference frequency‐domain method based on a massively parallel iterative solver. The inversion code is based upon the solution of a least squares optimisation problem and is solved using a nonlinear gradient method. It is fully parallelised for distributed memory computational platforms. Our full‐waveform inversion workflow is applied to the 3D Marmousi‐2 and SEG/EAGE Salt models with long‐offset data. The maximum inverted frequencies are 6 Hz for the Marmousi model and 2 Hz for the SEG/EAGE Salt model. The detailed structures are imaged successfully up to the depth approximately equal to one‐third of the maximum offset length at a resolution consistent with the inverted frequencies.     

Appraisal problem in the 3D least squares Fourier seismic data reconstruction

Least squares Fourier reconstruction is basically a solution to a discrete linear inverse problem that attempts to recover the Fourier spectrum of the seismic wavefield from irregularly sampled data along the spatial coordinates. The estimated Fourier coefficients are then used to reconstruct the data in a regular grid via a standard inverse Fourier transform (inverse discrete Fourier transform or inverse fast Fourier transform). Unfortunately, this kind of inverse problem is usually under‐determined and ill‐conditioned. For this reason, the least squares Fourier reconstruction with minimum norm adopts a damped least squares inversion to retrieve a unique and stable solution. In this work, we show how the damping can introduce artefacts on the reconstructed 3D data. To quantitatively describe this issue, we introduce the concept of “extended” model resolution matrix, and we formulate the reconstruction problem as an appraisal problem. Through the simultaneous analysis of the extended model resolution matrix and of the noise term, we discuss the limits of the Fourier reconstruction with minimum norm reconstruction and assess the validity of the reconstructed data and the possible bias introduced by the inversion process. Also, we can guide the parameterization of the forward problem to minimize the occurrence of unwanted artefacts. A simple synthetic example and real data from a 3D marine common shot gather are used to discuss our approach and to show the results of Fourier reconstruction with minimum norm reconstruction.     

Pseudo‐spectral method using rotated staggered grid for elastic wave propagation in 3D arbitrary anisotropic media

Staggering grid is a very effective way to reduce the Nyquist errors and to suppress the non‐causal ringing artefacts in the pseudo‐spectral solution of first‐order elastic wave equations. However, the straightforward use of a staggered‐grid pseudo‐spectral method is problematic for simulating wave propagation when the anisotropy level is greater than orthorhombic or when the anisotropic symmetries are not aligned with the computational grids. Inspired by the idea of rotated staggered‐grid finite‐difference method, we propose a modified pseudo‐spectral method for wave propagation in arbitrary anisotropic media. Compared with an existing remedy of staggered‐grid pseudo‐spectral method based on stiffness matrix decomposition and a possible alternative using the Lebedev grids, the rotated staggered‐grid‐based pseudo‐spectral method possesses the best balance between the mitigation of artefacts and efficiency. A 2D example on a transversely isotropic model with tilted symmetry axis verifies its effectiveness to suppress the ringing artefacts. Two 3D examples of increasing anisotropy levels demonstrate that the rotated staggered‐grid‐based pseudo‐spectral method can successfully simulate complex wavefields in such anisotropic formations.     

均匀介质中MRS方法三维模型的核磁共振响应

MRS方法三维含水体的核磁共振正演计算涉及两个难点：①激发场表达式的快速计算,该表达式为包含双重Bessel函数乘积的积分式,将该表达式分为两个积分区间,第一积分区间应用贝塞尔函数的汉克尔函数表述式及其大宗量渐近特性,将其转化为Fourier正（余）弦变换,采用快速计算方法实现数值计算;另一积分区间的计算直接应用一般的数值积分算法即能获得较高的计算精度。②三维含水体的空间离散化,提供柱坐标和直角坐标中的两种离散方法,可对任意形状的三维含水体进行构建。在此基础上,开发出相应的正演程序,并进行几种常见的三维含水体的MRS正演,对其初始振幅曲线进行规律总结。结果表明,三维含水体的MRS振幅响应与层状含水层振幅响应类似,使用收发共圈的工作模式将难以辨别地下含水体的空间形态。