Building Complex Synthetic Models to Evaluate Acquisition Geometries and Velocity Inversion Technologies

Complex broad bandwidth 3D synthetic velocity and density models have been created to evaluate acquisition geometries and velocity inversion technology in seismic imaging of complex geological provinces. The approach used to build these models is demonstrated and it used standard processing and interpretation tools. The models mimic real geological complexity and have rich wavenumber content. 3D Acoustic finite-difference forward modelling was used to generate synthetic shot gathers on idealised acquisition geometries of ocean bottom nodes (OBN) and wide azimuth streamers (WAZ). The large source to receiver offsets (> 15km), 360 degree source to receiver azimuth coverage and dense spatial sampling of the receivers (25m in x and y), provide the opportunity to evaluate acquisition geometries and velocity inversion technology, such as full waveform inversion (FWI). To this end the synthetic shots are available upon request.