Seismic exploration is one of the main geophysical methods to extract quantitative inferences about the Earth’s interior at different scales from the recording of seismic waves near the surface. Main applications are civil engineering for cavity detection and landslide characterization, site effect modelling for seismic hazard, CO2 sequestration and nuclearwaste storage, oil and gas exploration...

In order to mitigate against possible impacts of seismic surveys on baleen whales it is important to know as much as possible about the presence of whales within the vicinity of seismic operations. This study expands on previous work that analyzes single seismic streamer data to locate nearby calling baleen whales with a grid search method that utilizes the propagation angles and relative arriv...

Remote detection and characterization of fractured reservoirs is facilitated in this project by developing a revolutionary software system. The Model-Automated Geo-Informatics (MAGI) software integrates basin modeling, seismic data, synthetic seismic wave propagation and well data via information theory. The result is a seismic inversion cast in terms of fracture and other reservoir characteris...

Seismic images and the geologic information they provide contribute significantly to our understanding of the earth’s subsurface. In this thesis, I focus on methods relevant for constructing and interpreting seismic images, including methods for velocity estimation, seismic imaging, and interpretation, which together address key aspects of reflection seismic data processing. Specifically, I pro...

Information about reservoir properties usually comes from two sources: seismic data and well logs. The former provide an indirect, low resolution image of rock velocity and density. The latter provide direct, high resolution (but laterally sparse) sampling of these and other rock parameters. An important problem in reservoir characterization is how best to combine these data sets, allowing the ...

In reflection seismology, knowing the seismic wavelet is important both for processing seismic data and for modeling the seismic response. There are two approaches to obtain the seismic wavelet. One approach is deterministic and the other is statistic. This work belongs to the second category. A seismic wavelet is determined by the product of amplitude spectrum and phase spectrum. A conventiona...

Seismic interpretation can be supported by seismic attribute analysis. Common seismic attributes use mathematical relationships based on the geometry and the physical properties of the subsurface to reveal features of interest. But they are mostly not capable of describing the spatial arrangement of depositional facies or reservoir properties. Textural attributes such as the grey level co-occur...

Meteorite impacts will be a key seismic source for probing Mars’ interior during the InSight mission. Maximising data exploitation requires a good understanding of impact-generated seismic ground motions (waves), which has been limited by a lack of observational data and the practical difficulty of replicating relevant martian impact conditions in experiments. The aim of this PhD project is to ...

Horizons are geologically significant surfaces that can be extracted from seismic images. Color coding of horizons based on amplitude or other attributes can help reveal ancient sedimentary environments and structural features. Extracted horizons are also used for building structure models and stratigraphic interpretations. We propose two methods for constructing seismic horizons aligned with r...

A method for displaying prestack seismic data that highlights azimuthal anisotropy is shown. Observations of azimuthal anisotropy in prestack seismic data using this and other methods make it clear that azimuthal anisotropy is observed in all types of seismic data, land, marine and multicomponent and it is widespread, from the shallowest to the deepest reflectors. Consequently, anisotropy must ...