The Effect of Interpolation On Imaging And Azimuthal AVO: A Nordegg Case Study

To address the issue of inadequate sampling, typical of land seismic data, an azimuthal AVO (AVAZ) processing flow should include interpolation and prestack migration prior to the AVAZ inversion. It is well established that seismic data should be prestack migrated before AVO, but the irregular sampling inherent in land data can introduce migration artifacts which distort the estimates of the AVO inversion. With the introduction of the extra dimension of azimuth this is even more a concern for AVAZ analysis. By performing 5D minimum weighted norm interpolation before PSTM, the wavefield is better sampled leading to better migration and AVAZ results. This has been demonstrated on synthetic examples. This paper demonstrates the benefits of this on a real dataset by comparing AVAZ processing sequences with and without interpolation and correlating the predictions quantitatively to well control. The interpolation/PSTM flow proceeding AVAZ inversion produces better correlations to the well control than only PSTM.