Shallow Seismic Refraction - Identification and Automatic Interpretation of Arrival Times

Abstract

Automation of human activities through computational methods is essential in today's world, whether in the academic world, in the corporate world or in everyday tasks, and in geophysical processing is not different. Much of the time spent processing a shallow refraction seismic study is spent on picking for first break identification, which, despite technological advances, remains dependent on the visual evaluation of the seismic interpreter. Thus, the automation of this process provides a more efficient result and provides more time for interpretation. In this work we used the peak detection program (Zscore). The application of the Z-score showed automatic picking efficiency, identifying 88% of the first breaks, with 92% of the detections having an error less or equal to 2%. In addition, a method for interpreting seismic events, identifying the velocities and thicknesses of the layers, was successful: Simultaneous Inversion. Thus, several automations in the processes of the seismic refraction method have proved to be satisfactory in real data.