Stochastic velocity modeling for assessment of imaging uncertainty during seismic migration: Application to salt bodies

Variations in the migration velocity model directly affect the position of the imaged reflectors in the subsurface, leading to structural imaging uncertainties. These uncertainties are not explicitly addressed when trying to deterministically build an adequate velocity model. This paper presents a new stochastic geology-controlled velocity modeling method that handles the possible presence of a salt weld. This permits the generation of a large set of geologic scenarios and associated velocity models. Each model is used to remigrate the seismic data. Then, a statistical analysis of the resulting seismic images is performed to quantify the local variability of the seismic responses. The approach is applied to the imaging of salt diapirs in an iterative scheme (migrate, pick, and update). The results indicate that similar to stacking common-midpoint gathers, the statistical analysis preferentially preserves recurrent features from one image to another. In particular, this analysis permits the distinction between the connected and detached diapirs without prior knowledge about their connectivity, highlighting the potential of the method to resolve important aspects of the basin and reservoir architecture. More generally, it provides quantitative information on the parts of the seismic image most sensitive to migration velocity variations, which opens an interesting perspective to quantitative interpretation uncertainty assessment. Finally, the presented application also suggests that it is possible to significantly improve the quality of the generated seismic images by sampling many possible geologic scenarios.