Parameterization of A Priori Geological Knowledge in Seismic Inversion

An approach to parameterization of prior geological knowledge concerning the changes in depositional environment in space and geological time for their quantitative use in the workflow of seismic inversion is presented. The idea is to describe the observed or expected facies diversity in terms of a few statistically independent factors (generalized geological variables). The topology and metrics of the model are determined by the set of basic depositional environments and the statistics of facies transitions. The introduced parameters make it possible to estimate the occurrence probability of different facies at each model point. The proposed technique can be applied for regions with various degree of detail of the existing geological knowledge and amount of available well logging data.