Seismic Quality Monitoring During Processing: What Should We Measure?

Understanding geological and geophysical specificities allows one to design a suite of dedicated QC attributes that best correspond to the (re)processed seismic dataset and best respond to the processing defined objectives. Active monitoring of processing flows imposes operational constraints whose benefits can be seen in the final result and the confidence attached to it. We successfully applied the processing flow monitoring methodology on a low-fold non-WAZ land reprocessing project, where we defined five general directions for which we wanted to achieve significant improvements: (1) signal quality for seismic bandwidth and SNR optimization, (2) lateral consistency for identification of areas with unstable phase, low resolution and weak SNR, (3) pre-stack consistency for seismic inversion studies, (4) azimuthal consistency for fracturation analysis and (5) seismic interpretability for fault mapping and interpretation.