3D ray tracing has been the main method for simulating seismic wave propagation in NORSAR geophysical tools since the early eighties. It started out as a single ray shooting approach but has evolved into a very advanced and efficient state-of-the art wavefront tracer (WF3D) that constitutes the basic engine in a number of tools used at various stages of the exploration and production process, like
- simulating large realistic 3D surveys for generating synthetic data or illumination maps, both for primary and converted waves.
- survey planning of 3D marine, land, VSP, and OBS geometries
- seismic velocity estimation (tomography)
- Green’s functions for seismic imaging and Kirchhoff modelling
- calculating wave propagation effects in the geological overburden in the form of illumination vectors used e. g. in 4D reservoir analysis (SeisRoX/SimPLI approach)
- ray mapping (time-depth, depth time)
- ray perturbation (sensitivity of rays to velocity changes)
The most recent NORSAR wavefront tracer is capable of running in 3D complex anisotropic geological structures (VTI, TTI).
Illustration of ray paths in a 3D geological structure, reflected from a given target
horizon back to a given receiver geometry. The red markers show the reflection
points and the yellow markers show the intersections between the rays and the
various geological horizons.
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