Quantitative interpretation sensitivity to angle and frequency-dependent pre-stack time shift, amplitude and phase perturbations

As discussed by Long (2017), marine ‘broadband’ signal processing flows typically incorporate a combination of free-surface deghosting, spectral shaping, and attenuation compensation. Overall, there are many opportunities to corrupt the phase content in an angle-dependent and frequency-dependent manner during any signal processing flow, and such risks may increase during aggressive ‘broadband’ flows. We conducted a synthetic modelling study to quantify and understand how angle-dependent time shifts, angle-dependent frequency variations, or frequency-dependent phase errors can impact the recovery of elastic impedance attributes using pre-stack simultaneous seismic inversion. All modelling and inversion was 2D in nature, included no noise considerations, and assumed the velocity model was perfectly understood.