Probing the question of “how good can seismic get? I ask you to spend a good amount of time just looking at the amazing detail this section shows. When you click, I will circle a couple of areas of interest that did not show up before this run. Instead of starting with a problem to solve, we must run the program to tell us it even exists. In any case this is just another phase of the story started on the last show, basically an effort to see how much processing could be improved. The area chosen was random. Clicking again will start with the older part of the show.

Why inversion & integration is needed to see stratigraphy. The purpose of this posting is to educate the industry on the fact that current processing does not provide this capability. What is really bad is the lack of awareness of the scope of the problem. I am in the middle of finalizing some concepts- The section to the right is just a snapshot of where I am right now. The difference between it and previous inversion attempts is that the task has been broken into fairly short time steps to accommodate the rapidly changing shape of the down wave. I am, of course, happy with the preliminary results, and what they show me prompted this presentation. The message is that assembling the interface spikes supplied by the inversion has clarified the lithology. I have been saying this all along, but this work just provided a better comparison for explanation. I will use duplicates of this display to point out some details.

u Finding faults is a major weakness of current processing. This is specially true of strike slip patterns, where no vertical throw may be apparent. Whether or not you believe this one, It obviously could not be picked from the input, so inversion and integration made the difference. Click when you are through looking at my faults.

And here is the full input from which the left picture was lifted. It is an optimized stack that cleaned up the gathers in a simple way.

And here is the preliminary time variant inversion and integration from that input. The improvement made by breaking the run into some 8 overlapped time segments is most significant. This obviously is due to the changes in the shape of the down wave with travel time. The next version will move to before stack, where the wavelet changes are equally as important. The next pair of slides will carry you through a few details.

INPUT Take a good look at the continuity in the oval area. No structure of interest evident here. So toggle on to the next slide.

FINAL Sometimes the system surprises me too. However, due to total trace independence, it is impossible for it to manufacture such continuity as I point to (with the red arrow), on its own. So toggle back and forth until you really absorb what has happened here. Of course it would be good to look at the other changes. Click on yellow oval for my latest serious show. It will take a while to load, so study this slide while you wait. Now go on to look at the new before stack additioon.

Here is the latest final, with a slight adjustment due to run display differences. To explain inversion before stack: I believe my non-linear logic for reflection coefficient solving is the best in the business. Of course to simulate lithology requires integration, so I used this combination as a base, applying it to collected results from each horizontal offset (later combined in this display). In addition I broke vertical time into around 8 sections, solving for each independently, then merging. The reason for this extra work was the knowledge that the shape of the down wave changes drastically with time traveled. As you can see the importance of this principle was proven by the outstanding success of the process. Of course this came a little late in the game, but at least I am largely satisfied professionally.