SGEMS-UQ: An uncertainty quantification toolkit for SGEMS

While algorithms and methodologies to study uncertainty in the Earth Sciences are constantly evolving, there are currently few open-source integrated softwares that allows the general practitioners access to these developments. This paper presents SGEMS-UQ, a plugin for the SGEMS platform, that is used to perform distance-based uncertainty analysis on geostatistical simulations, and the resulting transfer functions responses used in subsurface modeling and engineering. A versatile XML-derived dialect is defined for communicating with external programs that eliminates the need for ad-hoc linking of codes, and a relational database system is implemented to automate many of the steps in data mining the spatial and forward model parameters. Through a graphical user interface, one can map a set of realizations and transfer function responses into a multidimensional scaling (MDS) space where advanced visualization utilities, and clustering techniques are available. Once mapped in the MDS space, the user can explore linkage between parameters and transfer function responses by querying a SQL database. Consideration is given to the use of programming designs to produce a code-base that is manageable, efficient, and extensible for future applications, while being scalable to work with large datasets. Finally, we illustrate the versatility of the code-base on a real-field application of modeling uncertainty in reservoir forecasts for an Oil reservoir of the West Coast of Africa.