- journal_title：Geophysics
- Contributor：Jeffrey Shragge ; David Lumley
- Publisher：Society of Exploration Geophysicists
- Date：2013-03-01
- Format：text/html
- Language：en
- Identifier：10.1190/geo2012-0182.1
- journal_abbrev：Geophysics
- issn：0016-8033
- volume：78
- issue：2
- firstpage：S69
- section：Seismic Migration
Time-lapse (4D) analysis of seismic data acquired at different stages of hydrocarbon production or gas/fluid injection has been very successful at imaging detailed reservoir changes. Conventional time-domain analysis of 4D data sets usually assumes a linear perturbation about a reference baseline earth model. However, this assumption is violated when production/injection significantly alters the subsurface generating large 4D velocity changes, time shifts, and complicated 4D wavefield coda, necessitating a more robust 4D analysis involving prestack wave-equation depth migration and velocity analysis. We address these situations by extending conventional 3D wave-equation migration velocity analysis (WEMVA) based on one-way wave-equations and single-scattering theory to 4D velocity estimation using a “parallel” inversion approach involving parallel solution of two separate inversion problems. Recognizing that the 4D WEMVA strategy requires precomputed baseline/monitor image-difference volumes, we develop an approximate 4D WEMVA technique that replaces these differences with a single weight function derived from the smooth background time-lapse image difference. We demonstrate the usefulness of the parallel and an approximate 4D WEMVA approach using a synthetic time-lapse <mml:math display="inline"><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>CO</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:mrow></mml:math>CO2 geosequestration experiment that requires inverting for a thin-layer velocity change derived from <mml:math display="inline"><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>CO</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:mrow></mml:math>CO2 injection in an analogue North Sea reservoir. The parallel 4D WEMVA solutions generate an excellent high-resolution velocity estimates, whereas the approximate methods recover lower-resolution estimates with magnitudes that must be rescaled through a post-inversion gradient line-search.