Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2018
The discipline of subsurface seismic imaging, or mapping the subsurface using seismic waves, takes a remote sensing approach to probe the Earth's interior. It measures ground motion along the surface and in wellbores, then puts the recorded data through a series of data processing steps to produce seismic images of the Earth's interior in terms of variations in seismic velocity and density. The ground movements recorded by seismic sensors (such as geophones and seismometers onshore, or hydrophones and ocean bottom seismometers offshore) contain information on the media's response to the seismic wave energy that traverses them. Hence the first topic of this chapter is on seismic data and their acquisition, processing, and interpretation processes. Because nearly all modern seismic data are in digital form in order to be stored and analyzed in computers, we need to learn several important concepts about sampled time series such as sampling rate and aliasing; the latter is an artifact due to under-sampling. In exploration seismology, many useful and quantifiable properties of seismic data are called seismic attributes. Two of the most common seismic attributes are the amplitude and phase of seismic wiggles. They are introduced here together with relevant processing issues such as gain control, phase properties of wavelets, and the Hilbert transform, which enables many time-domain seismic attributes to be extracted. To process real seismic data, we also need to know the basic issues of data formats, the rules of storing seismic data in computers. To assure that the data processing works, we need to conduct many quality control checks. These two topics are discussed together because in practice some simple quality control measures need to be applied at the beginning stage of a processing project.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.