Complex seismic amplitude inversion for P-wave and S-wave quality factors

Abstract

Stratum quality factors (P-wave and S-wave quality factors, Qp and Qs) have gradually been utilized in the study of physical state of crust and uppermost mantle, tectonic evolution, hydrogeololgy, gas hydrates, petroleum exploration, etc. Different opinions of the seismic attenuation mechanism result in various approaches to estimate the P-wave and S-wave quality factors. Considering the viscoelasticity of the underground medium, the constitutive matrix of the Earth medium is written as the superposition of homogeneous background medium, elastic perturbation medium and viscoelastic perturbation medium. Under the hypothesis of Born integral and stationary phase approximation, the seismic reflectivity is initially raised in terms of P-wave and S-wave moduli, density, P-wave and S-wave quality factors. Furthermore, incorporating the complex seismic traces with the seismic wavelets at different offsets, a twostep inversion approach is proposed to estimate the P-wave and S-wave quality factors. The AVO/AVA Bayesian inversion approach is suggested to estimate the P-wave modulus and S-wave modulus with the real component of the pre-stack seismic data initially. Taking the estimated P-wave and S-wave moduli as prior information, the P-wave and S-wave quality factors are further estimated with the imaginary component of the complex pre-stack seismic data, which is the quadrature of the original data. Finally, synthetic examples demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to estimate P-wave and S-wave quality factors stably and properly, and two field data examples demonstrate that the proposed approach may work as an efficient approach to fluid identification.