Seismic Attributes and Acoustic Inversion for Shallow Marine Slope Stratigraphy Analysis

Abstract

Geophysical seismic surveys have been used in marine site characterization for subsea engineering and the design of offshore structures. Signal processing plays a key role in obtaining seismic attributes from observed seismic data to identify subsurface geological features within complex shallow sediments. Instantaneous amplitude, phase, and frequency are the most widely used seismic attributes to indicate geological features, but those time-domain data are too limited to define an accurate subsurface model in depth. Therefore, seismic inversion is also required to generate additional geospatial subsurface model information to aid in shallow stratigraphy interpretation. In this paper, we applied both geophysical signal processing and stochastic seismic inversion to a high-resolution multichannel seismic dataset from the Eastern North American Margin (ENAM). Seismic attributes from the Hilbert transform and inversion modeling results (acoustic impedance and modeling uncertainty) were integrated to define better geological horizons and discontinuities. The results show the integrated geophysical subsurface models can support seismic interpretation and improve shallow marine site characterization.