Improving Geological Robustness into Iterative Geostatistical Seismic Inversion

Summary In geostatistical seismic inversion methods the model perturbation and update is performed by stochastic sequential simulation and co-simulation algorithms in a regular Cartesian grid and using a global variogram model to describe the spatial continuity pattern of the subsurface petro-elastic property. These approaches do not capture heterogeneous small-scale features being hard to be reproduced when dealing to highly non-stationary geological environments. This work integrates local anisotropy steering volumes to describe local anisotropies within iterative geostatistical seismic inversion methods. The incorporation of local structural and spatial information allow to obtain more consistent spatial distribution of rock properties while avoids any transformation of inversion grid during simulation process by traditional geostatistical simulation techniques. The proposed methodology of this work was successfully applied to synthetic and real application examples.