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Improving the fidelity of seismic imaging in deep Earth exploration
Author(s) -
Zhou HuaWei,
Hu Hao,
Zou Zhihui,
Suppe John
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
acta geologica sinica ‐ english edition
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.444
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1755-6724
pISSN - 1000-9515
DOI - 10.1111/1755-6724.14098
Subject(s) - tectonics , marine geology , china , center (category theory) , atmospheric research , geology , library science , geography , oceanography , seismology , archaeology , meteorology , computer science , chemistry , crystallography
The geologic interpretability of seismic images relies on their fidelity, which defines the truthfulness of the imaged targets in terms of their resolution, position accuracy and artifact. It is particularly challenging to improve the fidelity of seismic images in deep Earth exploration due to the decrease of data quality with depth and lack of direct validations beyond the drilling limit. Both the inversion and modeling approaches that are used in most geophysical studies seek those solution models whose predictions best match the observations in data space. However, selection of the output models in the data space rather than the output space has exacerbated the nonuniqueness problem for inversion and modeling in deep Earth exploration. In most seismic imaging studies of deep Earth so far, we have not been able to apply geologic constraints directly in the imaging process.