Seismic Attenuation at the Blue Mountain Geothermal Field

Session: Full-Waveform Inversion: Recent Advances and Applications [Poster]
Type: Poster
Date: 4/29/2020
Time: 08:00 AM
Room: Ballroom
Description: 

Accurate estimate of seismic attenuation is valuable for geothermal reservoir characterization. Seismic waves traveling through geothermal reservoirs result in amplitude loss and velocity dispersion. Waveform inversion has the potential to reconstruct subsurface attenuation distributions. However, a reliable estimate of an attenuation model is difficult because the amplitudes of seismic data are affected by other factors such as noise and density variations in addition to attenuation. We develop a novel seismic-waveform attenuation inversion method for addressing the difficulties in attenuation inversion. To mitigate the effect of amplitude distortion, we analyze the local centroid-frequency shifts using short-period Fourier transform and then use the frequency shifts as a misfit function in the waveform inversion to invert for the attenuation model. We apply the method to 2D surface seismic data acquired at the Blue Mountain geothermal field, and our results show that the geothermal reservoir exhibits higher attenuation than the surrounding regions.

Presenting Author: Zongcai Feng

Authors