Bayesian Linear Seismic Inversion Integrating Uncertainty of Noise Level Estimation and Wavelet Extraction

Abstract

Seismic impedance inversion is an important method to identify the spatial characteristics of underground rock physical properties. Seismic inversion results and uncertainty evaluation are the important scientific basis for risk decision-making in oil and gas development. Under the assumption that the impedance and the error of the observed seismic data meet the Gaussian distribution or log–Gaussian distribution, the Bayesian linear seismic inversion can analytically obtain the posterior probability distribution of impedance. However, errors from observation, calculation, model and other factors can lead to an inaccurate and incomplete uncertainty evaluation. In this paper, the noise variance is used to represent the noise level of seismic data and the uncertainties from seismic wavelet extraction and noise level estimation are considered in inversion. Assuming that the probability distribution of the noise variance meets the inverse gamma distribution and the seismic wavelet meets the Gaussian distribution, we could obtain the conditional distribution for one variable given another analytically using well-log data and seismic data. In order to integrate the uncertainty from noise level estimation and wavelet extraction into the seismic impedance inversion, the Gibbs sampler algorithm was applied to draw a set of realizations of noise variance and wavelet. For each realization, the corresponding posterior probability model of impedance was achieved by Bayesian linear inversion and the final posterior probability of the impedance model was obtained by integrating all the single posterior probabilities for each pair of wavelet and noise variance. Synthetic and real data experiments showed that the uncertainties of seismic wavelet extraction and noise level estimation have an important influence on inversion results and their uncertainties. The proposed method could effectively integrate the uncertainty of wavelet and noise estimation to obtain a more accurate and comprehensive uncertainty evaluation. Under the assumption that the model meets the linear relationship and the parameters meet some specified distribution, the proposed method has high calculation efficiency. However, it also loses some accuracy when the assumptions are not completely consistent with the actual situation.