How Well Can Fracture Orientations Be Estimated from Noisy AVOA Data?

P136 HOW WELL CAN FRACTURE ORIENTATIONS BE ESTIMATED FROM NOISY AVOA DATA? ROY WHITE 1 COLIN MACBETH 2 and MARK HARRISON 1 1 School of Earth Sciences Birkbeck University of London South Wing UCL Malet Place London WC1E 6BT. 2 Department of Petroleum Engineering Heriot-Watt University Summary In contrast to the normal incidence reflectivity or AVO intercept the AVO gradient is a noisy seismic attribute. In isotropic AVO analysis random noise in the data is amplified by gradient estimation. Also the AVO gradient is strongly negatively correlated with the AVO intercept. The inevitable consequence of extending amplitude analysis from two