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This project investigates the seismic response to facies variation by modelling facies variation itself, using two different modelling techniques, and then by modelling the seismic response to this variation. This study looks at a new set of attributes, examines their potential both as standard seismic attributes (a qualitative approach), and uses geostatistical analysis to further develop the ability of these attributes to differentiate the seismic response to facies variation. Sedpak, a basin modelling package was used to try to create facies models as a basis for further geophysical modelling. A case study using data from the Beryl area was unsuccessful at trying to create facies models due largely to the limited amount of input data and the scale of the models being attempted. Although an impressive package, Sedpak is most useful when modelling at a basin scale. In order to study the seismic response of sedimentary facies variation simple, deterministic models were set up using the geophysical modelling package, Gxii. An established methodology for analysing seismic data is the study of seismic attributes. The study considers some autocorrelation and power spectrum-derived functions previously described in the literature (Sinvhal and Sinvhal, 1992), and treats them as seismic attributes. Initial analysis of these new attributes in 2D showed them to be successful at detecting the presence of channels within seismic data. On the basis of this, a multivariate study was carried out. Results of this analysis show these attributes to have the potential to detect the presence of channels within seismic data. A suite of computer programs were developed to calculate 3D volumes of the new attributes, and to produce colour sections through the attribute volumes. The volumes were granted using a moving time window and calculating attribute values down through the data volume. Evaluation of the colour sections themselves to illustrate facies changes was disappointing. It is apparent that more work is needed to evaluate the window length over which the attributes are calculated.

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No / The North Sea subsurface shows the marks of long-term tectonic subsidence. Much of it contains a thick record of glacial and interglacial deposits and landscapes, formed during multiple glacial cycles and the associated regressions and transgressions during the past two million years. At times of lower sea level than today, areas that are presently submerged were fertile lowlands more favourable for hunting and gathering than the surrounding upland. These drowned lowlands are not captured by traditional 1:250,000 geological maps of the North Sea subsurface because the underlying seismic and core data are commonly too widely spaced to achieve this. Palaeolandscape mapping requires identification of building blocks with spatial scales in the order of 1 km or less. As high-density 2D and high-quality 3D seismics are becoming available for an increasing part of the North Sea, glacial and interglacial palaeolandscapes can be reconstructed for more and more areas. An overview of published palaeolandscape reconstructions shows that shallow time slices through 3D data provide map views that are very suitable for the identification of landscape elements. For optimal results, each time slice needs to be validated and ground-truthed with 2D seismics and with descriptions and analyses of cores and borehole samples. Interpretations should be made by teams of geoscientists with a sufficiently broad range of expertise to recognise and classify even subtle or unfamiliar patterns and features. The resulting reconstructions will provide a context and an environmental setting for Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic societies and finds.

Fracture patterns control flow and transport properties in a tight gas reservoir and therefore play a great role in siting the production wells. Hence, it is very important that the exact location and orientation of fractures or fracture swarms is known. Numerical models show that the fractures may be manifested on seismograms as discrete events.A number of data processing workflows were designed and examined to enhance these fracture signals and to suppress the reflections in seismic data. The workflows were first tested on a 2D synthetic data set, and then applied to 3D field data from the San Juan Basin in New Mexico. All these workflows combine conventional processing tools which makes them easily applicable. Use of conventional P-wave data may also make this approach to locate fractures more economical than other currently available technology which often requires S-wave survey or computationally intensive inversion of data. Diode filtering and dip-filtering in the common-offset domain yield good results and work very well in the presence of flat reflectors. NMO-Dip filter depends on the NMO velocity of the subsurface, but removes both flat and slightly dipping reflectors without affecting the fracture signals. Prior application of dip-moveout correction (DMO) did not make any difference on reflections, but included some incoherent noise to the data. The Eigenvector filter performed very well on flat or near-flat reflectors and left the fracture signals almost intact, but introduced some incoherent noise in the presence of steeply dipping reflectors. Harlan's scheme and Radon filtering are very sensitive with regard to parameters selection, but perform exceptionally well on flat or near-flat reflectors. Dip-filter, Eigenvector filter, and Radon filter were also tested on 3D land data. Dip-filter and Eigenvector filter suppressed strong reflections with slight perturbations to the fracture signals. Radon filter did not produce satisfactory result due to small residual moveout difference between reflectors and fracture signals. / Master of Science

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Research on earthquakes and volcanos is of particular importance in seismic instable regions. To improve opportunities of research and civil defence, continuous coverage of seismic activities of a large area at a certain time is necessary. This paper deals with the issues concerning the collecting of environmental data by a number of autonomous field stations and their transmission to central station through a cost effective low bandwidth packer radio data network. This paper deals with the acquisition, preprocessing and transmission of seismic data. Therefore, a prototype system is discussed, which will be developed at the University of Salzburg, Austria.

Compressional and shear body waves generated by a seismic source can be analyzed using vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data-acquisition procedures. If a goal of exploration geophysics is to study the physics and exploration applications of shear waves, it is important to know how much S-wave energy a source puts into the earth. To maximize S-wave created by a source, considerable effort has been expended to create surface sources that apply horizontally directed impulses to the earth (horizontal vibrators and horizontal impacts). In my project, radial shear (SR) and transverse shear (ST) waves generated by different types of sources and recorded by multicomponent receivers in a VSP well are examined and compared. The research question is ‘can a vertical-impact source create shear wave energy equivalent to the S-wave energy produced by standard horizontal-force shear-wave sources?’ To quantify the energy of shear-wave modes produced by different kinds of seismic sources, a VSP field test program was conducted at the Devine Test Site owned by The University of Texas at Austin. In the VSP data acquisition phase, the orientation of horizontal geophones is unknown because a borehole geophone rotates as it is lowered into a well, causing the horizontal geophones at each receiver station to be oriented in different azimuths. To study body waves, it is essential that all geophones in a vertical VSP array be oriented in a consistent azimuth. I mathematically rotated multi-component VSP sensors systems to change them from the inconsistent orientation they had at the time of data recording to a user-defined consistent-azimuth coordinate system. This rotation allowed ST and SR wave modes to be identified. After geophone rotation, direct-S wavelet amplitudes were analyzed in 90-ms windows starting at the first-break times of each arriving mode. Analysis of the rotated data showed that SR energy created by a vertical-impact source, a shot-hole explosive, and an inclined-impact source differ only slightly, and that there is essentially no difference in ST energy among these sources. Also, the signal frequency of SR and ST wave modes produced by horizontal-force shear wave sources are essentially the same as the frequency of SR and ST wave modes generated by a vertical-impact source. These test data show that vertical and horizontal vibrator sources produce shear wave modes having amplitudes 1000 times stronger than the other energy sources we tested. Considering the cost of using inclined-impact sources which is relatively expensive compared to using a vertical-impact source, and the difficulty of applying inclined-impacts in some land conditions, it is possible to obtain direct-S data of the same quality by using only a vertical-impact source or a shot-hole explosive. The arguments given above demonstrate that it is not necessary to use inclined-impact sources or horizontal vibrators to produce shear-wave data. S-wave data of the same quality produced by a horizontal-force source are provided by simple vertical-impact sources and shot-hole explosives. / text