Stochastic seismic inversion based on an improved local gradual deformation method

Abstract A new stochastic seismic inversion method based on the local gradual deformation method is proposed, which can incorporate seismic data, well data, geology and their spatial correlations into the inversion process. Geological information, such as sedimentary facies and structures, could provide significant a priori information to constrain an inversion and arrive at reasonable solutions. The local a priori conditional cumulative distributions at each node of model to be inverted are first established by indicator cokriging, which integrates well data as hard data and geological information as soft data. Probability field simulation is used to simulate different realizations consistent with the spatial correlations and local conditional cumulative distributions. The corresponding probability field is generated by the fast Fourier transform moving average method. Then, optimization is performed to match the seismic data via an improved local gradual deformation method. Two improved strategies are proposed to be suitable for seismic inversion. The first strategy is that we select and update local areas of bad fitting between synthetic seismic data and real seismic data. The second one is that we divide each seismic trace into several parts and obtain the optimal parameters for each part individually. The applications to a synthetic example and a real case study demonstrate that our approach can effectively find fine-scale acoustic impedance models and provide uncertainty estimations.