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High-resolution acoustic impedance inversion to characterize turbidites at

Marlim Field, Campos Basin, Brazil

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DOI: 10.1190/INT-2013-0137.1

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 t Technical paper

High-resolution acoustic impedance inversion to characterize turbidites

at Marlim Field, Campos Basin, Brazil
Tatiane M. Nascimento1, Paulo T. L. Menezes2, and Igor L. Braga3
Downloaded 06/11/14 to 179.218.11.75. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

Abstract
Seismic inversion is routinely used to determine rock properties, such as acoustic impedance and porosity,
from seismic data. Nonuniqueness of the solutions is a major issue. A good strategy to reduce this inherent
ambiguity of the inversion procedure is to introduce stratigraphic and structural information a priori to better
construct the low-frequency background model. This is particularly relevant when studying heterogeneous
deepwater turbidite reservoirs that form prolific, but complex, hydrocarbon plays in the Brazilian offshore basins.
We evaluated a high-resolution inversion workflow applied to 3D seismic data at Marlim Field, Campos Basin, to
recover acoustic impedance and porosity of the turbidites reservoirs. The Marlim sandstones consist of an Oligo-
cene/Miocene deepwater turbidite system forming a series of amalgamated bodies. The main advantage of our
workflow is to incorporate the interpreter’s knowledge about the local stratigraphy to construct an enhanced
background model, and then extract a higher resolution image from the seismic data. High-porosity zones were
associated to the reservoirs facies; meanwhile, the nonreservoir facies were identified as low-porosity zones.

Introduction deterministic methods as their first choice (Tetyukhina

High-resolution reservoir characterization studies al-
low detailed lithology-fluid prediction in the various
stages of the reservoir life cycle. Commonly, this is a
complex task, in which interpreters usually have to in-
tegrate a huge amount of data with different degrees of
accuracy and spatial resolution, such as 3D seismic data
(uniformly sampled information over large areas with
low vertical resolution), well logs (high-resolution dis-
tributed along irregularly distributed well paths) and
geologic conceptual models.
Inversion of seismic data is a widely used tool to es-
timate reservoir geometry and petrophysical characteri-
zation (Kelamis et al., 1995). One benefit of the seismic
inversion process is to increase the frequency content
of the seismic data, which is band limited (Latimer et al.,
2000). Furthermore, the result of inversion also allows
lithology differentiation and hopefully the estimation of
the fluid content, and not only the interface geometry as
given by the amplitude attribute (Avseth et al., 2005;
Contreras et al., 2005). Because acoustic impedance
is a property related to lithology, the inversion process
enables greater inference of subsurface geology in seis-
mic interpretation (Goodway et al., 1997).
Seismic inversion procedures can be divided into
two main categories (Bosch et al., 2010): deterministic
and stochastic methods. Geoscientists tend to use the
et al., 2010). The incorporation of structural and strati-
graphic features in the inversion process decreases the
inherent nonuniqueness of the inversion results (Mer-
letti and Torres-Verdín, 2006). These inputs allow one
to differentiate between similar mathematical solutions,
on the basis on their geologic viability (Pendrel and Van
Riel, 1997).
The nonuniqueness in the seismic inversion pro-
cedure is mainly due to the band-limited frequency con-
tent, missing the highest and lowest frequencies even
for noise-free data, of the registered seismic waves. This
can be partially mitigated by the introduction of exter-
nal independent a priori information, e.g., coming from
the wells, to determine the lowest and highest fre-
quency content to be incorporated into the inverse
model. In practice, the inversion of seismic data is more
complicated (Bosch et al., 2010) due to the presence
of noise in real data, forward-modeling simplifica-
tions needed to estimate the solutions in a reasonable
time, and uncertainties in well-to-seismic ties (veloc-
ities used in depth-to-time conversions), wavelet extrac-
tion, and links between the reservoir and elastic
parameters.
The standard inversion workflow commonly uses a
stratal slicing technique for building a low-frequency
model in model-based inversions (Russell and Toksöz,

1
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Faculdade de Geologia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. E-mail: tatianegeologa@gmail.com.
2
UERJ, Departemento de Geologia Aplicada, Faculdade de Geologia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. E-mail: ptarsomenezes@pq.cnpq.br.
3
Invision Geophysics, Rio das Ostras, Brazil. E-mail: igor@invisiongeo.com.br.
Manuscript received by the Editor 30 August 2013; revised manuscript received 3 February 2014; published online 16 May 2014. This paper
appears in Interpretation, Vol. 2, No. 3 (August 2014); p. T143–T153, 10 FIGS., 1 TABLE.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1190/INT-2013-0137.1. © 2014 Society of Exploration Geophysicists and American Association of Petroleum Geologists. All rights reserved.

Interpretation / August 2014 T143

 1991). In some areas, the construction of this low-fre-
quency model is hampered due to a wide variation in
the lithology distribution throughout the investigated
area. Examples in offshore Brazil include deepwater
channel fan, switching delta lobe deposits, structural
Downloaded 06/11/14 to 179.218.11.75. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/
Figure 1. Location map of the seismic data set at Marlim
Field, Campos Basin, Brazil. P1, P2, P3, and P4 are available
wells. Coordinates are in UTM, zone 39S. Marlim reservoir
outline is shown in the black line. L1, location of the inter-
preted seismic line.
Figure 2. Simplified stratigraphic chart of the Campos Basin, modified from
Guardado et al. (2000).
T144 Interpretation / August 2014
highs caused by faults, and irregular deposition due
to the movement within salt layers. The described sce-
nario corresponds precisely to what is found in the
giant Marlim Field (Figure 1), where Oligocene and Mio-
cene sand-rich turbidites form important reservoir
rocks. These turbidites were deposited in deepwater
settings associated with slope and continental rise de-
posits (Freire, 1989). The Marlim sandstones occur
dominantly as tabular bodies with more than 95% of
massive sand with excellent porosity, up to 30% (Souza
et al., 1989). The porosity is controlled by carbonate
cementation, Carvalho et al. (1995) identified four dif-
ferent diagenetic reservoir facies within Marlim sand-
stones. Deepwater turbidite reservoirs, like Marlim,
usually show a complex distribution of sand bodies
with thicknesses many times smaller than the vertical
resolution limit of the seismic data (Ribeiro, 2012).
Therefore, a more detailed description of the reservoir
can only be achieved through the inversion procedure.
In the present paper, we show the results of a high-
resolution deterministic inversion workflow to recover
acoustic impedance and predict porosity distribution of
the Marlim turbidite reservoirs. The main advantage of
the proposed workflow is to better estimate the low-fre-
quency model through the so-called HorizonCube
model builder (de Groot et al., 2010; Brouwer et al.,
2012) that incorporates stratigraphic knowledge of
the main sedimentary sequences of the Campos Basin
in the study area. A priori independent information
given by four available wells in the area plays a funda-
mental role in different steps of the proposed workflow.
Beside the traditional well-to-seismic ties for wavelet
estimation, available stratigraphic information in the
wells was used to help in the seismic interpretation
and build the high-resolution low-frequency model.
Finally, the well logs provided constraints to the abso-
lute impedance and porosity estimations
in calibrating the inversion.
Campos Basin stratigraphic setting
The sedimentary section of the Cam-
pos Basin can be divided into three meg-
asequences associated to the following
tectonic development stages: rift, transi-
tional, and drift (Figure 2).
The Barremian lacustrine sediments
of Lagoa Feia Formation overlie the
Hauterivian Cabiúnas basalts (120–
130 Ma); these basalts represent the eco-
nomic basement of the Campos Basin.
The Lagoa Feia sediments are consid-
ered to be the most important source
rocks in the Campos Basin. The Aptian
sequence contains, from base to top:
conglomerates, carbonates, and evapor-
itic rocks deposited in a period of
tectonic quiescence. This transitional
stage represents the beginning of the
drift phase in which the sediments are
 associated to the first seawater inflows through the
Walvis Ridge (Leyden et al., 1976).
The drift stage starts with a marine megasequence
characterized by the Albian/Cenomanian shallow-water
calcarenites and calcilutites of the Macaé Formation.
The marine Upper Cretaceous to Paleogene deepwater
clastic section (Carapebus Formation) is composed by
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shale, marls, and sandstone turbidites, deposited in a
period of general tectonic quiescence and of continued
subsidence. These turbidite systems comprise the most
important petroleum reservoirs in the Campos Basin
(Bruhn et al., 2003). Progradational siliciclastic sequen-
ces characterize the remaining Neogene section. In the
deep water of the Campos Basin, the deposition of this
megasequence was strongly conditioned by salt tecton-
ics (Mohriak et al., 1996).
Marlim Field data set
The giant Marlim Field is located in the northeastern
portion of the offshore Campos Basin, Brazil. This oil
field, discovered in 1985 at water depths ranging from
600 to 1200 m (Figure 1), had an initial estimate of over
6.4 billion STB with 1.97 billion barrels recoverable
(Candido and Cora, 1978). Oil production started in
1991, and Marlim shortly became the largest producing
field in Brazil with daily production of 610,000 barrels
(Johann et al., 2009).
The reservoirs in Marlim Field (Figure 1) consist of
an Oligocene/Miocene deepwater turbidite system.
They form a series of amalgamated sandstone bodies
known as Marlim sandstone (Peres, 1993). The turbi-
dite sedimentation occurred under the influence of a
regional northwest–southeast transfer faults system.
This regional system, reactivated in the Tertiary, pro-
vided the pathway for the turbidite sedimentation,
reworking, and redistribution of several deepwater
reservoirs in the Campos Basin (Cobbold et al., 2001).
The Marlim sandstone shows a remarkable signature
in the seismic amplitude data (Figure 3). Fainstein et al.
(2001) associate this high-amplitude seismic response
to the impedance contrast between the high-porosity
reservoirs and the overlying high-speed shale. The
Marlim trap is stratigraphic (pinch out) in the western,
Figure 3. Seismic signature of the Marlim reservoir (turbi-
dite), modified from Candido and Cora (1978).
northern, and southern portions of the reservoir. To the
east, the trap is structural, where the accumulation ends
against a normal listric fault associated with the under-
lying moving salt. According to Mello et al. (1994), this
fault represents the main route of oil migration from the
presalt source rocks to the turbidite reservoir.
In late 1996, early 1997, Geco-Prakla acquired for
Petrobras the 3D seismic data interpreted in this study
(Sansonowski et al., 2007). The survey area spanned
greater than 720 km2 (Johann et al., 2009), and the ac-
quisition parameters are shown in Table 1. This data set
became public in 2003 when the Brazilian Petroleum
Agency (ANP) provided a poststack time-migrated,
zero-phase American polarity (Brown and Abriel,
2014), 3D seismic amplitude cube. The ANP also pro-
vided check shots, stratigraphy, and composite well
logs (density, sonic, porosity, and gamma ray) of four
wells in the study area (Figure 1).
Inversion workflow
To interpret the Marlim reservoir, we applied a
four-step inversion workflow, namely, (1) seismic data
filtering, (2) well-to-seismic tie, (3) HorizonCube and
acoustic impedance inversion, and (4) porosity pre-
diction.
Seismic data filtering
Seismic interpretation is highly dependent on the
quality and resolution of the seismic data (Davogustto
et al., 2013). Frequently, even a small amount of noise
contaminating the amplitude data can mask subtle seis-
mic events. Data filtering is then necessary to reduce
noise and enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of the seis-
mic data. To that end, we applied a dip steering median
filter (Brouwer and Huck, 2011; Qayyum and de Groot,
2012) to attenuate the high-frequency random noise
from the seismic amplitude data. The main advantage
Table 1. Seismic acquisition parameters.
Acquisition
Area (km2 ) 720
Number of cables 6
Spreads (offset, m) 0–148–3535.5
Channels/cable 288
Shot point interval (m) 25
Receiver interval (m) 12.5
Cable interval (m) 50
Sample rate (ms) 1
Bin size (m) 12.5 × 25
Cable depth (m) 9
Azimuth (°) 123
Nominal fold 72
Traces∕km2 230,400
Interpretation / August 2014 T145
 of this approach is that the median operator removes
outliers in the data and retain steps in data values as en-
countered in nearby faults, so the filtering process pre-
serves the traces’ amplitudes and edges and enhances as
continuous events (Qayyum and de Groot, 2012). There-
fore, it facilitates structural interpretation because it en-
ables more accurate autotracking and allows the
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interpreter to extract more detail from the seismic data.
In Figure 4, we show the comparison between the
original amplitude data (Figure 4a) and the dip steering
median filtered data (Figure 4b). It is possible to ob-
serve in the filtered data an overall improvement, asso-
ciated with the high-frequency noise content reduction.
As a result, we obtain a sharper subsurface image. An
important aspect of the filtered data is the better defi-
nition of small amplitude reflections inbetween the ma-
jor horizons. The enhancement on the lateral continuity
of these small reflections is a necessary condition for a
precise structural horizon mapping of the HorizonCube.
The corresponding data-driven multihorizon tracking
algorithm is based on following the dip and azimuth
of the seismic data. According to Brouwer et al.
(2012), the use of smoothed dip fields is preferable be-
cause they are more continuous than amplitude fields
and less prone to noise.
Well-to-seismic tie
The well-to-seismic tie is the best way to relate the
seismic response to rock properties by using synthetic
seismograms generated from well logs (White, 1997). It
is widely used for interpretation because it enables the
correct identification of mapped seismic reflections and
also optimizes the correlation between the acoustic
impedance model and seismic data. A successful inver-
sion scheme starts with the wavelet determination for a
Figure 4. Upper panel: left, original amplitude data; right, correspondent am-
plitude spectrum. Lower panel: left, dip steered median filtered data; right, cor-
respondent amplitude spectrum. Note the overall enhancement of the filtered
data associated to the noise reduction in the high-frequency range (above 75 Hz).
T146 Interpretation / August 2014
well-to-seismic tie at all suitable wells. After that gener-
ation, crosscorrelation and validation can be used to se-
lect one wavelet to invert the seismic data. Usually, the
correlation rate of the seismic-to-well tie depends on
the quality of the well and seismic data and also the
time/depth relationship.
We edited the original sonic and density well-log data
of all four available wells to remove spurious values.
The sonic and density logs were multiplied to yield
the acoustic impedance logs (Figure 5). The well data
were then converted to time using a check-shot-cali-
brated time-depth curve. After that, we established
the well-to-seismic tie in time by using a statistical
wavelet extraction from the data (Nascimento et al.,
2013). The central idea is to estimate a wavelet that in-
creases the correlation between synthetics and the seis-
mic data. Therefore, an appropriate choice of interval,
length, frequency, and taper filter is absolutely neces-
sary for a better estimation of the wavelet (Salleh
and Ronghe, 1999).
In the present work, we extracted the wavelet using
a 500 ms window centered at 2650 ms. In Figure 5, we
show the extracted wavelet with its spectrum and also
the good match between the synthetic and seismic data
at the P1 well. The synthetics were calculated by con-
volving the extracted wavelet with the acoustic imped-
ance computed from the available well logs. The
correlation was done at the same time window of the
wavelet estimation. The correlation coefficient is 83%.
These results are representative for all four wells in
the study area. The 17% mismatch between the seismic
and synthetic data can be explained by two different
geologic causes. Above the top of the Marlim reservoir
(TM), we have a dipping siliciclastic sequence (see
Figure 3), a 2D situation, whereas our convolutional
model is essentially 1D. Below the base
of the Marlim reservoir (BM), we have
highly heterogeneous marls/carbonate
sections that lead to a lower correlation
between the signals.
Acoustic impedance inversion and
the HorizonCube
Seismic inversion is the process of
restoring the subsurface impedance
model or any other elastic property from
seismic data. This can be achieved by
several approaches, the most common
of which is to formulate the solution
as the minimization of an objective
function representing the difference be-
tween the modeled data and the ob-
served seismic. For many decades, the
stationary convolution model has been
used to shape a seismic trace, but it fails
to take into account propagation effects
such as absorption and dispersion that
occur on a real seismic data set.
 The inversion scheme herein adopted (Braga, 2011)
takes advantage of the ability that the continuous wave-
let transform (CWT) has to represent non stationary
phenomenon (Appendix A). We define the CWT of a sig-
nal as the crosscorrelation of a dilated and translated
version of a reference wavelet with the seismic signal
under analysis. This shows how well the signal corre-
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mation of the subsurface impedance. The advantage of
the proposed method is that the wavelet can be esti-
mated from the redundant crosscorrelation of closely
dilated wavelets, where the inversion process can take
care of small variations in the pulse form. The method-
ology proposed by Braga (2011) is similar to the Mallat
and Zhong (1992) and Wapenaar et al. (2005) ap-

lates with each wavelet at each time instant (Braga,
2011). The decomposed seismic trace is a 2D complex
matrix in which the maximum energy at each scale rep-
resents the most likely region to be the true reflectivity
series. By isolating the maximum energy and computing
the inverse CWT, one can reconstruct a good approxi-
proaches in the use of CWT to extract subsurface infor-
mation from seismic data.
The HorizonCube is a 3D stack of horizons (de Groot
et al., 2010) typically spaced in the order of the seismic
sampling interval. At least two framework horizons are
needed for bounding the calculations in between them.

Figure 5. Well-to-seismic tie at well P1 with synthetic constructed using the extracted wavelet. Upper panel: well-log suite of well
P1. TM corresponds to the top, and BM corresponds to the base of the Marlim reservoir. Marlim turbidite shows high porosity, low
density, and acoustic impedance. Lower panel: synthetic and observed seismic amplitude, extracted wavelet and correspondent
amplitude spectrum.

Interpretation / August 2014 T147

 In the present work, we mapped four main framework
horizons using the stratigraphic control given by the
four wells, from bottom to top (Figure 6a): Albian, Blue
Marker, Oligocene, and Miocene. These horizons corre-
spond to the main regional stratigraphic units in the
study area. The Albian horizon corresponds to the
top of Macaé Formation, composed of shallow water
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carbonate section (Candido and Cora, 1978). The lower
Oligocene Blue Marker is a basinwide maximum flood-
ing surface. The Oligocene horizon represents the tur-
bidite system of the Carapebus Formation, and the
Miocene horizon is on the top of that sequence. A
dip-steered autotracker algorithm was used (de Groot
et al., 2010). Beside speed, awareness of fault detection
is a significant advance of the algorithm as it automati-
cally stops at mapped fault planes. Multihorizon
tracking is then applied to map several horizons within
the confined region between the framework horizons
(Figure 6b).
To establish a background model, we filtered the
acoustic impedance wells logs in the 0–10 Hz low-
frequency range and then interpolated the filtered
acoustic impedance along the mapped horizons with ac-
curate stratigraphic control (Figure 6b). Typical exam-
ples of interpolation algorithms are inverse distance
and kriging (Huck et al., 2010). In the present work,
we have chosen the inverse distance-based algorithm.
As a result, we obtained the detailed low-frequency
model shown in Figure 6c. This model contains only in-
formation about the low-frequency trend that is not
available in the seismic amplitude data. After the seis-
Figure 6. HorizonCube high-resolution acoustic impedance inversion workflow. (a) Four main mapped framework horizons,
(b) numerous autotracked horizons, (c) realistic low-frequency model, and (d) high-resolution absolute acoustic impedance.
T148 Interpretation / August 2014
mic inversion, this trend is added to seismic inversion
results to obtain an absolute acoustic impedance esti-
mate (Figure 6d). In Figure 7, we display the 0.83 cor-
relation coefficient between the acoustic impedance
computed from the well logs and the recovered abso-
lute acoustic impedance at P1 well.
Porosity prediction
Porosity prediction from seismic data constrained by
well control can significantly improve reservoir charac-
terization (Angeleri and Carpi, 1982; Dolberg et al.,
2000). Seismic porosity maps are useful in providing in-
formation about the porosity spatial variation away
from the well control. The estimated porosities are rou-
tinely used as steering constraints to calculate, trends,
large-scale volumetric estimations, and also reveal
sweet spots within the reservoir.
The relationship between porosity and acoustic
impedance in the study area can be estimated by cross-
plotting these attributes at all four available wells (Fig-
ure 8a). To that end, we estimated a linear relationship
for the whole data set that can be described by a single
linear regression having a correlation coefficient of
0.75. Data points in Figure 8a are color coded by
gamma-ray logs, a good lithology indicator. As shown
in Figure 5, the Marlim reservoir is easily identified
as a low-density, high-porosity zone. In Figure 8a, we
separated identified gamma-ray data points with high
porosities (0.30 threshold) as associated to low imped-
ance values. In Figure 8b, we plot the selected points
against their position at the P1 well. One can note that
 these estimates correlate to Marlim sandstones. The
same correlation can be established at all other wells.
Our results are in accordance with previous geologic
knowledge of the studied Marlim sandstone Sansonow-
ski et al. (2007). These authors define the reservoir fa-
cies as a highly friable clean sandstone with low silt,
clay, and calcite content. Core analyses at various wells
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register an average porosity of 30% and a mean per-
meability of 2000 mD for the Marlim sandstone (Sanso-
nowski et al., 2007).
We used the calculated relationship ϕ ¼ 0.53 −
ð4.36 × 10−5 ÞAI, where ϕ is the porosity and AI is the
acoustic impedance, to convert the acoustic impedance
cube to a porosity cube. In Figure 9, we show a high-
resolution image of the predicted porosity distribution
along the Oligocene horizon. The high-porosity bodies
(ϕ > 0.30) correspond to Marlim sandstones, whereas
the surrounding shale and shaly sand facies systemati-
cally show lower porosity trends (ϕ < 0.30). All drilled
wells in the study area penetrated the Marlim horizon at
high-porosity zones (Figure 9). With a high-resolution
picture of the subsurface as provided by the proposed
Figure 7. Upper panel: crossplot between inverted acoustic
impedance (IP-abs-mm) versus upscaled well-log acoustic
impedance (IP-0-40-MD) at P1 well. Lower panel: comparison
between the recovered acoustic impedance along an arbitrary
section and the upscaled well-log acoustic impedance at P1
well.
inversion workflow, it is possible to clearly distinguish
between reservoir and nonreservoir facies.
Conclusions
Seismic inversion is a key tool for reservoir charac-
terization because it can provide petrophysical informa-
tion that better describes the subsurface. One important
aspect in the inversion procedure is the correct choice
of the background model because it can minimize the
inherent ambiguity of the process. This is particularly
relevant in complex geologic areas where a standard
model building workflow may introduce model errors.
In the present work, we applied a high-resolution
deterministic inversion workflow to estimate acoustic
impedance and porosity of turbidites reservoirs at
Marlim Field, Campos Basin, Brazil. The proposed
workflow incorporates the interpreter’s stratigraphic
knowledge to better estimate the low-frequency model.
A priori independent information of four wells in the
study area provided important constraints to several
steps of the proposed workflow. The main reservoirs
facies (clean sandstones) of the Marlim Field were
Figure 8. (a) Relation between porosity and acoustic imped-
ance for wells P1, P2, P3, and P4. The best-fit linear has a cor-
relation factor (r) of 0.75. Data points are color coded by
gamma-ray log values (color scale shown in the figure).
The black rectangle separates a region with low impedance
and high porosity values. (b) Picked points in Figure 8a plot-
ted at their actual position along well P1. The background im-
age is the recovered acoustic impedance magnified at the
Marlim turbidites interval. The selected points coincide with
the reservoir facies.
Interpretation / August 2014 T149

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Figure 9. Map of the predicted porosity distribution along Marlim horizon: P1,
P2, P3, and P4 are the available wells. The Marlim turbidites (clean sandstones)
are clearly highlighted as high-porosity bodies. Shale and shaly sand (nonreser-
voir) facies show lower (below 0.28) porosities. Coordinates are in UTM, zone
39S.
identified as high-porosity zones (porosities above
30%), whereas the nonreservoirs facies systematically
show low-porosity values.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Interpretation’s editor, Y.
Sun, associate editors R. Newrick, D. Herron, J.
Sumner, Y. DelMoro, R. Wegner, and four anonymous
reviewers for the valuable suggestions that helped to
improve the text. We thank dGB Earth Sciences for
making freely available the open-source seismic inter-
pretation software OpendTect. We acknowledge LA-
GEX/UERJ and Invision Geophysics for making
available its computational park. P. Menezes thanks the
support provided by research grant from CNPq. Data
set made available by ANP under the support of the
CNPq Project coordinated by A. Evsukoff. We also
thank the additional support by CNPq project
no. 470742/2011-9.
Appendix A
High-resolution inversion
Braga (2011) uses a formulation in the wavelet do-
main, in which a series of filters to trace the trace op-
erations can be designed and efficiently implemented.
T150 Interpretation / August 2014
For this, consider a seismic trace sðtÞ
as a function of time and its Fourier
transform ^ sðf Þ ¼ F s ðf Þ as a complex
function of frequency f . Whereas in
the convolutional model, the seismic
trace is represented by the convolution
of the reflectivity series and a wavelet
function, the goal is to develop a decon-
volution filter in the wavelet domain.
The Morlet wavelet is well suited to
the spectral decomposition of the seis-
mic signal and can be analytically ex-
pressed in time and frequency domain
as the pair of Fourier transform given by
1 i2πf 0 t −t2 ∕2
ψðtÞ ¼ e e ↔ψ^ ðf Þ
π 1∕4
pffiffiffi 2
¼ π 1∕4 2e−1∕2ð2πf −2πf 0 Þ ; (A-1)
where f 0 is a fixed parameter that rep-
resents the center frequency of the
wavelet. The wavelet transform of the
seismic trace s~ ðτ; αÞ ¼ W s ðτ; αÞ is a com-
plex function of time τ and a variable
scale α defined by α ¼ f ∕f 0 . The CWT
can be expressed as the inverse Fourier
transform of the product of ^ s and ψ c

(Addison, 2002):
Z
pffiffiffi ∞
s~ ðτ; αÞ ¼ α ^ c
αei2πf τ df ; (A-2)
sðf Þψ
−∞
where ^ c
are, respectively, the Fourier transform
s and ψ
of the input seismic trace sðtÞ and the complex conju-
gate of the Morlet wavelet.
To establish the relationship between the represen-
tation of the CWT and nonstationary filters, we define a
nonstationary filter Gðf ; tÞ as a function of time and fre-
quency. An example of that, might be a nonstationary
wavelet operating in reflectivity series represented by
s0 ðtÞ. Consider s^0 ðtÞ as the Fourier transform of the re-
flectivity series. By applying the nonstationary filter G
and the inverse Fourier transform, we obtain
Z ∞
sðtÞ ¼ s^0 ðtÞGðf ; tÞei2πf t df : (A-3)
−∞
In the wavelet domain, we can apply an equivalent op-
eration to retrieve the original reflectivity series s0 ðtÞ by
designing an inverse filter G−1 ≡ Θðτ; αÞ. Then, the de-
sired output ðs0 ðtÞÞ without the effect of a transient
wavelet is obtained through the inverse wavelet trans-
form Addison (2002):
Z Z
1 dτdα
sðtÞ ¼ s~0 ðtÞΘðτ; αÞψ τ;α ðtÞ 2 ; (A-4)
c α τ α
where c is a normalization constant to balance the
wavelet energy. In practice, because the CWT is

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Figure A-1. Illustration of the retrieving of a reflectivity series via wavelet trans-
form. (a) Original reflectivity series, (b) seismic trace produced by the convo-
lution of the original series of Figure 6a with a 40-Hz wavelet, and
(c) retrieved reflectivity series after applying the inverse wavelet transform.
nonorthogonal, the spectral representation is redun-
dant in time and frequency. This redundancy allows
the calculation of the inverse transform by sum-
ming the real part at all frequencies (Torrence and
Compo, 1998).
Figure A-1 illustrates the process of wavelet trans-
form via deconvolution, showing a very accurate recov-
ery of the original reflectivity series, which can be
confirmed by comparing the original (Figure A-1a) with
the recovered one (Figure A-1c). Once we recovered
reflectivity, the impedances can be calculated by simple
integration of the trace (Braga, 2011).
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Tatiane M. Nascimento received a
B.S. (2011) and an M.S. (2013) in geol-
ogy from Rio de Janeiro State Univer-
sity, Brazil. In 2012–2013, she worked
as a consultant at Invision Geo-
physics. Her research interests in-
clude seismic inversion and seismic
interpretation. She is a member of
the Brazilian Geophysical Society.
 Paulo T. L. Menezes received a B.S. (1986) in geology Igor Braga received a Ph.D. in (2011)
from Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil, an M.S. (1990) in exploration and petroleum engi-
in geophysics from the Federal University of Pará, Brazil, neering from Universidade Estadual
and a Ph.D. (1996) in geophysics from the National do Norte Fluminense, Brazil. His re-
Observatory of Rio de Janeiro. In 1996–1997, he worked search interests include seismic
as a consultant at Geomag Aerolevantamentos Ltda. Since processing, seismic inversion, and
1997, he has been a professor at Rio de Janeiro State Uni- reservoir characterization. He is the
versity. He also works as a geophysicist at Petrobras. His cofounder of Invision Geophysics,
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research interests include interpretation of potential-field, where he is the CEO. He is a member of SEG, EAGE,
seismic, and electromagnetic data. He is a member of SEG, and the Brazilian Geophysical Society.
EAGE, and SBGf.

Interpretation / August 2014 T153

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