Enforcing Smoothness and Assessing Uncertainty in One-Dimensional Pre-Stack Seismic Inversion

E-29 ENFORCING SMOOTHNESS AND ASSESSING UNCERTAINTY IN ONE-DIMENSIONAL PRE- STACK SEISMIC INVERSION Abstract 1 Estimation of elastic properties of rock formations from surface seismic data is a subject of great interest in the exploration and development of hydrocarbon reservoirs. In this paper a global inversion technique is used to estimate and appraise one-dimensional (1D) distributions of S-wave velocity P-wave velocity and density (ρ) from pre-stack surface seismic data. The objective is twofold: (a) to evaluate the effect of the choice of objective function and of the degree and type of smoothness criterion applied to the inversion; and (b) to introduce