Natural Perturbations of Shared Earth Models

Natural Perturbations of Shared Earth Models (SEMs) are introduced and demonstrated. SEMs, such as the Compound models developed at Norsk Hydro, contain representations of natural geological entities (compartments, formations, fluids, (geo)logical rules etc). Natural Perturbation of the entities (deformation, translation, rotation etc.) can be performed involving only very few degrees of freedom. Perturbations, exemplified in the paper, are run individually, in series or parallel. A special entity within the Compound model (the perturbation structure) holds the order of the Natural Perturbations to be evaluated and can therefore be used in (global and joint) automatic optimization.