Method for Predicting Transverse Wave Velocity Using a Gated Recurrent Unit Based on Spatiotemporal Attention Mechanism

Abstract Transverse wave velocity plays an important role in seismic exploration and reservoir assessment in the oil and gas industry. Due to the lack of transverse wave velocity data from actual production activities, it is necessary to predict transverse wave velocity based on longitudinal wave velocity and other reservoir parameters. This paper proposes a fusion network based on spatiotemporal attention mechanism and gated recurrent unit (STAGRU) due to the significant correlation between the transverse wave velocity and reservoir parameters in the spatiotemporal domain. In the case of tight sandstone reservoirs in the Junggar Basin, the intersection plot technique is used to select four well logging parameters that are sensitive to transverse wave velocity: longitudinal wave velocity, density, natural gamma, and neutron porosity. The autocorrelation technique is employed to analyze the depth-related correlation of well logging curves. The relationship between the spatiotemporal characteristics of these well logging data and the network attention weights is also examined to validate the rationale behind incorporating the spatiotemporal attention mechanism. Finally, the actual measurement data from multiple wells are utilized to analyze the performance of the training set and test set separately. The results indicate that the predictive accuracy and generalization ability of the proposed STAGRU method are superior to the single-parameter fitting method, multiparameter fitting method, Xu-White model method, GRU network, and 2DCNN-GRU hybrid network. This demonstrates the feasibility of the transverse wave velocity prediction method based on the spatiotemporal attention mechanism in the study of rock physics modeling for tight sandstone reservoirs.