Co-Author: Erik Neumann, ExxonMobil

“Broadband Marine Seismic” emerged in the last decade as a key technology area driven by the goal of higher resolution and S/N. In today’s broadband processing sequence, source designature, receiver and source-side deghosting, mean-sea-level redatuming, and phase Q correction are often applied sequentially, with amplitude Q compensation delayed till migration or post migration. We ask “how much of this workflow can we still improve?”

In the first part of this talk, I present a newly-developed method, Integrated Broadband Preprocessing (IBP), which aims to jointly achieve all the above-mentioned preprocessing steps, by estimating spike-sparse tau-p models fitting prestack data before migration. IBP works on single-sensor and multi-sensor measurements, and is compatible with all streamer profiles. I give examples of how this integrated approach, powered by near-optimal time-slowness sparsity, results in cleaner broadband data with less artifacts. In the second part, I zoom in on IBP’s background Q compensation, and contrast it with the commonly-used 1D inverse Q filtering. In particular, I share a time-referencing formula which is simpler and more accurate than the standard NMO-based time referencing (Xia’s method). I then show an uplift from the application of pre-SRME amplitude Q compensation on multiple attenuation.

Speaker Biography:  Mehdi Aharchaou, ExxonMobil
Mehdi Aharchaou is a research geophysicist at ExxonMobil. During his 5 years with the company, he has worked on various cutting-edge signal processing and inversion technologies, on topics such as deghosting, noise suppression, Q compensation, source designature, trace interpolation, sparse Radon and multiple attenuation; and he has presented on some of these topics at the SEG. Prior to joining the oil and gas industry, he graduated from Georgia Tech, Rice University and INP-ENSEEIHT (Toulouse, France) with three Masters degrees in Geophysics and Electrical Engineering, and he worked on multiple real-world problems in oceanography, borehole geophysics, in addition to earthquake and exploration seismology. His interests lie in the processing, imaging and inversion of geophysical data. Recently, his interests evolved towards the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the geophysical exploration workflow.