Oops: An Introduction to Seismic Wavefield Visualization

rd Science Solutions, Calgary, Alberta slync h@3rdScience.com Summary Despite all of the processes that we apply to our data, both processing and interpretation are ultimately visual sciences and our ability to make informed decisions rests heavily upon the effectiveness of the display at communicating coherent seismic information. Conventional seismic displays, however, cannot be considered as true seismic displays; they are seismic amplitude displays. A seismic wavefield is not defined by amplitude alone. It is continuous in both time and space and the amplitudes we record only represent one small part of the total wavefield. To fully visualize a seismic wavefield we must also visualize the connections between the amplitudes. It is my assertion that those connections contain far more information than the amplitudes alone and that by ignoring them we discard entire levels-of-detail of significant coherent information. A single unmigrated seismic section is examined using both conventional seismic amplitude displays and various seismic wavefield displays with the intent of proving that conventional seismic amplitude displays are incapable of imaging what should be visually dominating coherent features. An argument is made that we should adopt seismic wavefield displays for both processing and interpretation and that we should begin investigation of the features that they reveal.