A depth variant seismic wavelet extraction method for inversion of poststack depth-domain seismic data

Prestack depth seismic imaging is increasingly being used in industry, which has also led to an increasing need for its inversion results, such as acoustic impedance (AI), for reservoir characterization. Conventional seismic inversion methods for reservoir characterization are usually implemented in the time domain. A depth-time conversion would be required before inversion of depth-domain seismic data, which would depend on an accurate velocity model and a fine time-depth conversion algorithm. Thus, it could be beneficial that we can directly invert the depth migrated seismic data. Depth-domain seismic data could indicate a strong nonstationarity, such as spectral variation, which makes it difficult to use a constant wavelet for direct inversion in depth. To address this issue, we have developed a new wavelet extraction method by using a depth-wavenumber decomposition technique, which can generate depth variant wavelets to accommodate the nonstationarity of the depth-domain seismic data. The synthetic and real data applications have been used to test the effectiveness of our method. The directly inverted depth-domain AI indicates a good correlation with well-log data and a strong potential for reservoir characterization.