LECTURE OUTLINE GEOL 483.3, Term 2

SEISMOLOGY

Instructor:

Igor Morozov

Geology 142; 966-2761; Office hours: Mon, Thurs., 3-5 pm.

Recommended Texts:

• Applied Geophysics, 1990, Second Edition, W. M. Telford, L. P. Geldart, R. E. Sheriff. Cambridge University Press.
• Introduction to Seismology, 2-nd ed., 2009, Shearer, P. M., Cambridge University Press.

• Exploration Seismology, 1995, Second Edition, R. E. Sheriff and L P. Geldart, Cambridge University Press.

Introduction (lecture, video)

• Objectives and outline of the program

• Seismology and Seismics: Historical background and techniques
• Significance and scope of application of geophysical methods
• Mathematical concepts (lecture, video)
• Resolution, penetration, and bandwidth 

Location and tomography (lecture, video)

• Forward travel time problem
• Generalized inverse
• Least-squares inverse, regularization
• Resolution matrix
• Checkerboard resolution tests
• Statistical evaluation of model quality

Elements of rock mechanics ( lecture 1, video, lecture 2, video, lecture 3, video)

Elastic Waves (lecture, video)

• Mechanical properties of rocks, laboratory and in situ stress-strain relationships
• Elastic wave theory - scalar and full wave equations, general aspects of wave propagation
• Wave potentials
• Waves in layered media

Ray and wavefront modeling (lecture,  video)

• Ray tracing, shortest-path, eikonal-equation methods
• WKBJ approximation
• Ray-based amplitudes

Reflection coefficients (lecture,  video)

• Reflection and transmission of seismic waves
• Description of oblique incidence of plane waves
• P/SV mode conversions
• Zoeppritz equations
• Amplitude versus offset relations, their applications

Seismic Attenuation (lecture, video)

• Attenuation mechanisms
• Quality factor
• Relation of attenuation to dispersion
• Compensation of attenuation

Surface waves (lecture, video)

• Rayleigh and Love waves
• Velocity dispersion
• MASW

Refraction Methods (lecture, video)

• Physical Principles

• Survey procedures, onshore/offshore

• Applications: exploration, engineering, environmental, and crustal-scale

• Interpretation techniques
• Case studies

Reflection Methods (2D) (lecture, video)

• Physical principles
• Field operation geometries, 2D/3D, onshore/offshore
• Noise types, noise-recognition, signal-noise time and spatial relationships
• Design of signal detection systems and problem-oriented recording systems
• Velocity estimation methods
• Data display techniques, black and white/colour technologies, digital post-stack data handling and picking techniques
• Interpretation procedures, correlation of seismic arrivals to geology, borehole geology, wireline data
• Examples: seismic images of faults, subsurface reefs, synclines-anticlines, seismic stratigraphic signatures, high resolution near surface buried channels and lithologic discontinuities
• Subsurface target definition, horizontal and vertical resolutions imaging limitations
• Design of  acquisition-processing and interpretation 

Reflection Methods (3D) (lecture, video)

• Layouts and CMP binning in 3D
• Specifics of 3D survey planning
• Acquisition footprint
• Examples

Vertical Seismic Profiling (lecture, video)

• Method and specifics
• Data analysis
• VSP to CMP transform

Time and spatial series (lecture,  video)

• Convolution, Cross- and Autocorrelation, 
• Frequency Filtering
• Spatial filtering (f-k, t-p)

Reflection Seismic processing (lecture, no video yet, sorry)

• Filtering, deconvolution, spectral analysis, spectral whitening (lecture)
• Automatic Gain control (AGC)
• Automatic detection of arrivals (STA/LTA) 
• Stacking

Seismic attributes (lecture)

Migration and inversion

• Kirchhoff theory (lecture)
• Pre-and post-stack migration
• Time migration
• Depth migration
• Waveform inversion