Investigation of Key Controls on Estimating Fracture Orientations from AVOA Data

We test how well fracture orientations can be estimated from fitting amplitude variations with offset and azimuth (AVOA) under varying signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios. We perform these tests for the range of AVO classes, with different azimuth sampling. We also show that modifying the fracture properties can have a large impact on the reliability of estimating the AVOA parameters. We summarise levels of S/N required to reliably estimate fracture orientations under different AVO class and varying azimuth sampling. We conclude that estimating fracture orientations is most sensitive to S/N ratio, followed by the properties of the fracture network, the AVO class, and the sampling in offset-azimuth space.