Effects of offset-depth ratio on fracture detection: a physical modeling study

Summary A physical modeling experiment has been conducted to study the effects of different offset-depth ratio on imaging and the capability for fracture detection. The model consists three horizontal layers, where the top and bottom layers are isotropy and the middle layer is HTI medium. There are a dome and a fault block in the fractured layer. Two modeling data are acquired with the same geometry parameters except for offset-depth ratio. Two sets of data are used by the similar analysis methods to detect the fracture from stacking velocity and AVO gradient. The results show that the larger offset-depth benefits the detection of fracture orientation.