Application of an Automatic and Data-driven Surface-consistent Refraction Method to Complex Geology Scenarios in Desert Environment

Abstract

Summary Desert environments are often characterized by areas with complex geological structures affecting seismic imaging in geophysical exploration. A good velocity model building tool is needed to deal with these difficult systems where geophysical inversion is affected by high non uniqueness or variable sensitivity to the targets. We approach this problem by making use of a recently developed automatic and data-driven surface-consistent refraction method. The developed method is focusing on the analysis of phases (pQC) and amplitudes (aQC) of refracted arrivals. We successfully applied the methodology to many 3D land and marine seismic datasets. As a land example, we show the results for a prominent wadi. Another example is related to marine acquisitions characterized by salt and evaporitic sequences composed of evaporitic and clastic sediments.