M-Factorial Kriging - An Efficient Aid to Noisy Seismic Data Interpretation

The interpretation of 3D seismic data sets is often made difficult by the presence of various types of residual noise and amplitude attenuation effects. When subtle amplitude variations related to reservoir heterogeneities, fractures or fluid effects are investigated, these flaws may become penalizing in the framework of reservoir geophysics interpretation. Several geostatistical tools are proposed by different authors to complement seismic processing with the advantage of being optimized and applied in a focused subset of the 3D seismic data set. Among them, the M-Factorial Kriging technique is found to be very efficient in terms of quality of the results and turn-around times. In the case study presented in this paper, various M-Factorial Kriging models are combined in order to attenuate different components of noise and amplitude artefacts in the interest of a better structural and stratigraphic interpretation of a deeply buried clastic reservoir.