TIME-DOMAIN COMPUTATION OF NON-NORMAL INCIDENCE WAVEFIELDS IN PLANE LAYERED MEDIA1

A new time-domain method is introduced for the calculation of theoretical seismograms which include frequency dependent effects like absorption. To incorporate these effects the reflection and transmission coefficients become convolutionary operators. The method is based on the communication theory approach and is applicable to non-normal incidence plane waves in flat layered elastic media. Wave propagation is simulated by tracking the wave amplitudes through a storage vector inside the computer memory representing a Goupillaud earth model discretized by equal vertical transit times. Arbitrary numbers of sources and receivers can be placed at arbitrary depth positions, while the computational effort is independent of that number. Therefore, the computation of a whole plane-wave vertical seismic profile is possible with no extra effort compared to the computation of the surface seismogram. The new method can be used as an aid to the interpretation of plane-wave decomposed reflection data where the whole synthetic vertical seismic profile readily gives the interpreter the correct depth position of reflection events.     

A FILTER,DELAY AND SPREAD TECHNIQUE FOR 3D DMO1

The calculation of dip moveout involves spreading the amplitudes of each input trace along the source-receiver axis followed by stacking the results into a 3D zero-offset data cube. The offset-traveltime (x–t) domain integral implementation of the DMO operator is very efficient in terms of computation time but suffers from operator aliasing. The log-stretch approach, using a logarithmic transformation of the time axis to force the DMO operator to be time invariant, can avoid operator aliasing by direct implementation in the frequency-wavenumber (f–k) domain. An alternative technique for log-stretch DMO corrections using the anti-aliasing filters of the f–k approach in the x-log t domain will be presented. Conventionally, the 2D filter representing the DMO operator is designed and applied in the f–k domain. The new technique uses a 2D convolution filter acting in single input/multiple output trace mode. Each single input trace is passed through several 1D filters to create the overall DMO response of that trace. The resulting traces can be stacked directly in the 3D data cube. The single trace filters are the result of a filter design technique reducing the 2D problem to several ID problems. These filters can be decomposed into a pure time-delay and a low-pass filter, representing the kinematic and dynamic behaviour of the DMO operator. The low-pass filters avoid any incidental operator aliasing. Different types of low-pass filters can be used to achieve different amplitude-versus-offset characteristics of the DMO operator.     

STABILIZATION OF NORMAL-INCIDENCE SEISMOGRAM INVERSION REMOVING THE NOISE-INDUCED BIAS*

A main problem in computing reflection coefficients from seismograms is the instability of the inversion procedure due to noise. This problem is attacked for two well-known inversion schemes for normal-incidence reflection seismograms. The crustal model consists of a stack of elastic, laterally homogeneous layers between two elastic half-spaces. The first method, which directly computes the reflection coefficients from the seismogram is called “Dynamic Deconvolution”. The second method, here called “Inversion Filtering”, is a two-stage procedure. The first stage is the construction of a causal filter by factorization of the spectral function via Levinson-recursion. Filtering the seismogram is the second stage. The filtered seismogram is a good approximation for the reflection coefficients sequence (unless the coefficients are too large). In the non-linear terms of dynamic deconvolution and Levinson-recursion the noise could play havoc with the computation. In order to stabilize the algorithms, the bias of these terms is estimated and removed. Additionally incorporated is a statistical test for the reflection coefficients in dynamic deconvolution and the partial correlation coefficients in Levinson-recursion, which are set to zero if they are not significantly different from noise. The result of stabilization is demonstrated on synthetic seismograms. For unit spike source pulse and white noise, dynamic deconvolution outperforms inversion filtering due to its exact nature and lesser computational burden. On the other hand, especially in the more realistic bandlimited case, inversion filtering has the great advantage that the second stage acts linearly on the seismogram, which allows the calculation of the effect of the inversion procedure on the wavelet shape and the noise spectrum.     

SEQUENTIAL WIENER DECONVOLUTION TO IMPROVE SEISMIC RESOLUTION1

Two different techniques for performing time-variable Wiener deconvolution are compared using stacked seismic data. The conventional technique involves the empirical division of the data into a number of gates and the determination of time-invariant deconvolution filters for each gate. In the second technique, the deconvolution filter is recomputed after each time increment from a fixed-length data gate sliding along the trace. This scheme has the advantage that no a priori segmentation of the data is needed.     

THE GENERALIZED SPECTRAL FUNCTION OF A PLANE LAYERED MEDIUM*

The spectral function of a plane layered medium, which represents the net downgoing energy in the first layer due to a normally incident impulsive plane wave, plays an important role in the solution of the one-dimensional inverse problem in reflection seismology. Hitherto the extension to non-normal incidence was known only for a medium with free surface. By giving the extension for arbitrary surface reflection coefficients, this paper fills a gap.     

NORMAL-INCIDENCE WAVEFIELD COMPUTATION USING VECTOR-ARITHMETIC*

The time-domain discrete state-space models for lossless layered media, characterized by equal one-way traveltimes and normal-incidence reflection coefficients, can be formulated in a vector-arithmetic notation. This approach allows the computation of the seismic wavefield for arbitrary source and sensor location and is well suited for implementation on modern array processors. Included is an extension to a vector-arithmetic notation for the computation of synthetic vertical seismic profiles.