Mobil Oil Corporation

Mobil Oil Co

Andrejs Jurkevics

Andrew F Linville, Jr

Mohamed T Hadidi

Method to process seismic data to yield useful information regarding the subsurface area explored. Generated seismic energy travels into a subsurface formation where it is distorted and attenuated. The distorted and attenuated seismic pulse is detected by a geophone or other seismic receiver and recorded. The received seismic traces are first compensated for the attenuation effects of the earth filter and the compensated seismic traces are then used to produce a close approximation of a zero-phase, band-limited output wavelet of the reflectivity of the geophysical formation under exploration.

Method of processing geophysical data to compensate for earth filter

Method to process seismic data to yield useful information regarding the subsurface area explored. Seismic data which is acquired from the seismic exploration is autocorrelated and the amplitude spectrums estimated, stacked and averaged to reduce the effects of nonwhite reflectivity upon the data. The amplitude spectrum is cepstral windowed a first time to reduce the effects of reflectivity leakage on the amplitude spectrum, amortized at both low and high frequencies so that the amplitude spectrum will approximate the analog wavelet and cepstral windowed a second time to eliminate any remaining rapidly varying components of the amplitude spectrum. The resultant amplitude spectrum is then used to estimate the phase spectrum for the wavelet and a two-sided least squares filter is then designed to shape the estimated seismic wavelet into a zero-phase, low sidelobe output wavelet.

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Arlington, VA, United States of America

Andrejs Jurkevics