Case study: Geology-guided tomography in a complicated geological area
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Yanwei Xue*, Chung-Chi Shih, Hao Deng, Jun Tang, Zengbao Chen, Dawn Jantz, Michael O’Briain, Schlumberger
Abstract
Tilted transversely isotropic velocity modeling is required
for depth imaging over complicated geological areas. It is
a challenge to build an accurate tilted transversely isotropic,
velocity, delta, epsilon, azimuth, and dip field velocity
model for depth imaging as most of the earth model building
methods do not include the geological information. We
propose a geology-guided tomography method that
integrates geological information into the traditional
tomography using seismic common image point gathers
only, thus greatly helping the tomography process to obtain
a geologically plausible model with images that will be
close to the true subsurface structure. Data-driven and
geologically driven models were built. Migration and
tomography were run using two different models to validate
the sensitivity of the tilted transversely isotropic velocity
model. For subsalt areas with poor seismic illumination, we
use geology information as the main input to the
tomography to derive the velocity model. This workflow
was applied to all the main geological layers from top down.
To reduce geological interpretation time, map migration
was run to update key geological horizons with necessary
editing. The benefit of this method is shown in a southern
Gulf of Mexico field example.
Introduction
Most oil and gas reservoirs exist beneath complicated
geological features including faults, salts, mini-basins, and
others. Hence, it is a big challenge to build an accurate
model for seismic depth imaging. For the seismic
exploration industry, tilted transversely isotropic (TTI)
tomography (Woodward et al., 1998, 2008) is key
technology to solve the complex geology structures.
However, the tomographic inversion problem is ill-posed
(Osypov et al., 2008), which leads to large uncertainties and
ambiguities in inversion. For a practical earth model
building project, integrating the geological information into
tomographic processing can greatly improve the accuracy of
the velocity model to improve the seismic image.
For tomographic inversion, there are two key factors of
concern: 1) the inversion operator that is generated from the
input velocity model, the depth error from common image
point (CIP) picking, and the geological horizon; and 2) the
anisotropy – epsilon and delta, azimuth, and dip field. The
industry has invested much effort to update velocity and
anisotropy, but the accuracy of the TTI azimuth and dip field
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SEG International Exposition and 89th Annual Meeting
model is important also, and it can impact the structure
images.
In past decades, much effort was used to build a more
geologically feasible velocity model. One of these efforts,
the data driven steering filter (Hale, 2009), creates a
geological model with directional smoothing. This method
provides the inversion constrains using data-driven
geological model on tomography inversion. Unfortunately,
this tomography workflow, used to obtain geological
information directly from the seismic image, is limited by
steeply dipping complex structures and the quality of seismic
imaging, e.g., signal-to-noise ratio, poor imaging due to an
inaccurate velocity model, and others. These limitations
hamper the workflow. Subsalt areas are particularly difficult
to apply a traditional tomography work flow because of
limited ray-trace illumination and model uncertainty.
For complicated areas, we developed a geological model
construction workflow that starts from a regional
perspective to build a geologically plausible concept model.
Next, we used an iterative structural restoration to validate
the tectonostratigraphic framework. In support of the model,
non-seismic measurements such as gravity, magnetics, and
well data were used. This geology guided tomography
makes our tomography solution and seismic image more
geologically reasonable.
Herein, we show a field example to illustrate the integrated
workflow between geological interpretation and seismic
earth modeling and tomography. With the assistance of
geological model input, we can obtain a much more
geologically consistent velocity model with a higher-quality
depth image, especially for complicated geological
structures.
Geological structure interpretation
The first step of this method is to build a model of the
geological structure. Figure 1 shows a seismic depth image
from the southern Gulf of Mexico that contains synclines
caused by tectonic compressional folds. Overlain are four
horizons: Miocene (red), Oligocene (orange), Eocene
(yellow), and Cretaceous (purple). These horizons provide
us with the geological structure information. From this, we
must calculate dip and azimuth from the seismic and
interpreted horizons.
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 Geology-guided tomography

Figure 2a shows the structure dip calculated from seismic-

only. The alias dip field is indicated by red arrows. Figure
2b shows the dip field calculated from interpreted geological
structures. The dip field improvements are indicated by red
arrows.
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Figure 4: Model 2 Kirchhoff depth migration CIP gathers and

stacked image.

structures (Figure 2b). Next Kirchhoff depth migration

(KDM) stack and CIP gathers were generated with Models
1 and 2 respectively. Figure 3 shows the KDM CIP gathers
(left) and depth image (right) from Model 1. Figure 4 shows
the KDM CIP gathers (left) and depth image (right) from
Figure 1: Interpreted horizons overlay seismic image: Miocene (red),
Model 2. In Figure 3, we can see that the gathers are not flat,
Oligocene (orange), Eocene (yellow), and Cretaceous (purple)
horizons for dip field estimation.

a b
a

Figure 2: a) Dip field calculated from seismic data only, and b) dip b
field calculated from interpreted geological structures.

Tomography with geological structure guidance

We built two TTI models: Model 1 has the dip fields

generated from seismic data only (Figure 2a) and Model 2
includes the dip filed derived from interpreted geological

Figure 5: The seismic data with the tomographic solution overlaid:

a) tomography solution of Case 1; b) tomography solution of Case
2; c) tomography solution of Case 3.
Figure 3: Model 1 Kirchhoff depth migration CIP gathers and
stacked image.

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SEG International Exposition and 89th Annual Meeting Page 1949
 Geology-guided tomography
and the reflections are not focused in the stack imaging. In
Figure 4, the CIP gathers become flat, and the reflections in
the stack of the image are much better-focused. Using the
geological input, we can obtain more reliable CIP gathers
for tomography inversion and, therefore, obtain better
imaging quality.
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We also did tomography steering filter sensitivity testing
using Models 1 and 2 migrated CIP gathers and dip-field
input for steering filter with three different cases.
Case 1: Model 1 migrated CIP gathers and model 1 dip
field for steering filter.
Case 2: Model 1 migrated CIP gathers and Model 2 dip
field for steering filter.
Case 3: Model 2 migrated CIP gathers and model 2 dip
field for steering filter.
All three cases use the same tomography parameters.
Figure 5 shows the tomography solutions for these three
cases. Figure 5a shows the tomography solution of Case 1.
We can see that the updates are not following structures as
expected from geology and have unreasonable values.
Figure 5b shows the tomography solution of Case 2. The
updates are following the structure, but give too high a
velocity update at the flank of the anticline and bottom of a
syncline (Figure 5b). Figure 5c shows the tomography
solution of Case 3. The updates follow structures and
portray the updated velocity.
b illumination. However, geologists still can build a
Figure 6: Inline section: a) KDM image migrated with model
created by Case 1 method; b) KDM image migrated with model
created by Case 3 method.
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SEG International Exposition and 89th Annual Meeting
Figure 6 shows inline sections of KDM images from
tomography results, Case 1 and Case 3 (Figures 6a and 6b,
respectively.) Figure 7 shows crossline section of KDM
images from tomography result from Case 1 (Figure 7a) and
Case 3 (Figure 7b). Figure 7a shows over-migrated flanks of
the highly folded structures with strong migration artifact
(obvious at the top of the folded structures). Figure7b shows
more realistic structure with fewer migration artifacts.
From Figures 6 and 7, we can see the reduced cross-
reflection artifacts (indicated by red arrows) and improved
geological structure image quality (indicated by red circles).
a
b
Figure 7: Crossline section: a) KDM image migrated with model
created by Case 1 method; b) KDM image migrated with model
created by Case 3 method.
Tomography with geological input at subsalt area
For the subsalt areas, the seismic CIP input might not
provide enough support for tomography due to limited
geological concept model by mapping major
unconformities, which usually deviate from geologists’
expectations due to the inaccurate input model. To improve
the subsalt model, we can use the geologic horizons as input
to update the model. Figure 8a shows a Mesozoic Jurassic
unconformity (MJU) horizon interpreted from the
geological constraint tomography input model. Figure 8b
shows the geologists’ expected MJU horizon at this subsalt
area. At the same time, we also performed geological
structure analysis and rock-physics analysis on the latest
model and image. Based on these analyses, we determine
the location where the questionable velocity caused the MJU
deviation. The geological constraint tomography (GCT)
take this geological information as input and minimizes the
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 Geology-guided tomography

difference by updating the velocity within the questionable
areas, thus providing an updated model that can create a
depth image with more geological structures. Figures 9a and
9b show images from the input model; whereas, Figures 9c
and 9d show images from the updated model. Improvements
are obvious as shown by the red arrows.
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provides images that are truly representative of the reality of
the subsurface structures. For subsalt areas with limited
seismic illumination, we use geologic horizons instead of
seismic CIP input to guide tomography for updating the
subsalt velocity. The reverse time migration (RTM) images
(Figure 6, 7, and 9) show great geological structure and

image quality improvement.

Conclusions
Acknowledgements
An integrated earth model building and tomography
workflow was developed using the geological structure‘s The authors thank Schlumberger Multiclient for permission
dip field for the TTI model and tomography steering filter. to publish this work and for the use of the data. The authors
The KDM CIP gather and tomography test solutions show also thank Sylvia A. Centanni for her great help.
that the geology information guides the model update
process to obtain a geologically feasible model, which

a b

Figure 8: a) Mesozoic Jurassic unconformity (MJU) horizon interpreted from input model; b) geologists’ expected MJU horizon at this subsalt
area.

a b

c d

Figure 9: a) Image of inline with velocity overlain before GCT; b) Image of crossline with velocity overlain before GCT; c) Image of inline with
velocity overlain after GCT; d) Image of crossline with velocity overlain before GCT.

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