PGS Focus at SEG 2020

Ways of extracting more value from data dominate the event program with three particularly strong themes: advances in Full Waveform Inversion technology, improvements in Quantitative Interpretation, and using machine learning and data analytics.

PGS correspondingly leads the way in all three areas at SEG 2020, with a unifying vision of ‘Imaging and Characterization by Inversion’. First, fundamentally better ways to apply full wavefield FWI (Whitmore et al.; Yang et al.) and pre-stack data domain Least-Squares Migration (Duan et al.) are presented. PGS then use spectacular recent data from offshore Eastern Canada to showcase a synthesis of FWI, LSM, and QI to realize the data value in this emerging region. Alcantara et al. present a variety of FWI-LSM outputs suitable for QI, and Reiser et al. illustrate how to integrate FWI velocity models into QI-based prospectivity studies with sparse well control.

‘Efficiency and Productivity’ continues to be a core PGS theme. Widmaier et al. present a towed multisensor streamer platform optimized to achieve many geophysical ambitions, including deep and accurate FWI model updates. Lecerf et al. provide insights into the latest generation of efficient multisensor 4D acquisition. Machine learning applications to noise removal (Farmani and Pedersen) and residual moveout corrections (Zhou and Brown) point to the future automation of key seismic processing steps.

'Environmental Responsibility’ also features in the PGS contributions. Bude illustrates how to manage marine seismic surveys according to prescribed sound level thresholds, and Klüver et al. shares the latest lessons using continuous wavefield acquisition with low power air gun sources in shallow water Malaysia.

Andrew Presents a Flying Overview

Andrew Long presents an overview of the PGS contributions, including data examples, in this short 10-minute webinar.