Thin-bed reflectivity inversion and some applications

Thin-bed reflectivity inversion is a form of spectral inversion which produces sparse reflectivity estimates. It resolves thin layers below the tuning thickness under favourable circumstances when the assumptions are met in practice. The process differs from other inversions in that it is driven by geological rather than mathematical assumptions, and is based on aspects of the local frequency spectrum obtained by using spectral decomposition. Application of thin-bed reflectivity inversion to seismic data yields superior resolution which can help in various ways. The advantages include being able to pick up more reflection detail, to perform more accurate interpretation on seismic volumes obtained by convolving reflectivity volumes with wavelets of higher bandwidth than the input data, and to visualize subtle anomalies when some attributes are run on thin-bed reflectivity inversion output. Thin-bed reflectivity inversion is a useful process which should be utilized for extracting meaningful information from surface seismic data in the characterization of thin reservoirs.