A Multistep Approach to Multicomponent Seismic Image Registration With Application to a West Texas Carbonate Reservoir Study

Application of multicomponent seismic exploration produces multiple images of the same subsurface. For a successful interpretation of multicomponent images, it is crucially important to register them in the same coordinate frame. Accurate registration of time-domain images also provides an effective estimate of the interval VP/VS ratio, a major petrophysical attribute. We propose a multistep approach to image registration, which consists of initial interpretation, amplitude and frequency balancing, registration scan, and least-squares optimization. The approach is applied successfully to a 3C3D seismic dataset from West Texas, where multicomponent image registration provides an insight into a targeted carbonate reservoir facies.