Using seismic data from the oil and gas industry for oceanographic structures detection

Abstract

This work presents a methodology for legacy seismic data from oil and gas industry use for water column acoustic imaging. The objective is to improve the detection of internal mesoscale ocean structures by combining the results of the seismic data processing with oceanographic parameters. The procedure to obtain these images is called seismic oceanography and is an emerging tool for large-scale analysis of physical properties and processes of the ocean. The seismic data collection from the oil industry can be used to extract seismic oceanographic information since they both have similar survey configuration requirements for their data acquisition. The seismic data used were obtained from the Brazilian Oil Exploration Database and the oceanographic data were obtained from World Ocean Database. The methodology used to detect oceanographic structures was divided into four stages: data selection; oceanographic parameters analysis; seismic oceanography processing and interpretation; and combined analysis of seismic data with oceanographic data. The analysis and interpretation of the data showed that reflectivity curves calculated using oceanographic parameters have strong correlation with the seismic oceanography data. The detected reflections corroborate with the literature information about the boundaries of the water masses of the region and with abrupt gradients of the oceanographic parameters.