Exxonmobil Upstream Research Company

William A Burnett

Thomas A Dickens

Dennis E Willen

Pavel Dimitrov

Partha Sarathi Routh

Yaxun Tang

William Curry

Martin J Terrell

Andrew P Shatilo

A method, including: determining, with a computer, point spread functions for a plurality of parameter locations by performing at least a portion of a first iteration of an iterative full wavefield inversion process; determining at least one property for each of the point spread functions; and evaluating a candidate survey design based on the at least one property for each of the point spread functions.

Method to design geophysical surveys using full wavefield inversion point- spread function analysis

In the present inventive method, individual traces of seismic data are migrated () without any assembling of different midpoints or any summing of different offsets, so that post-migration processing or analysis, e.g. trace alignment, may be applied to the individual migrated traces () to compensate for any deficiencies among them, before stack and assembly. Thus, the present invention fully separates the steps of migration (), assembly (), and stacking (), which are combined together in traditional migration. Thus, imaging deficiencies can be measured and addressed in the image space before they are obscured by summation. Afterward, summation can proceed to construct the improved final image ().

Creating seismic images using expanded image gathers

Growing community of inventors

Houston, TX, United States of America

William A Burnett