Nonlinear seismic trace interpolation

The nonlinear correlation technique of Martinson et al. (1982) has been used to guide a nonlinear seismic trace interpolant in order to fill gaps in seismic surveys, replace bad traces and produce evenly spaced arrays. The correlation identifies corresponding features (reflectors) between adjacent seismic traces and quantifies the amount of travel time difference between the two seismic events. This information is used to construct synthetic (interpolated) traces, at any arbitrary distance between the correlated traces, which preserve dip and amplitude changes of the individual reflectors, assuming that such dip and amplitude changes occur linearly (or other specified functional form) between the correlated traces. Since each reflector can vary independently from the others, the full trace interpolant is nonlinear in nature. The technique is applied to a 48 channel, NMO corrected, CDP gather and to a stacked seismic section to demonstrate its use, sensitivities and limitations in processing and geologic interpretation studies. Traces synthesized in the CDP gather filling an artificial gap as wide as .75 km reproduce the true traces from the gap with remarkable fidelity (correlation coefficients between the synthetic and corresponding true traces are ≳0.85). With the seismic section, the interpolation is shown to aid in the geologic interpretation by increasing the spatial density, providing a clearer image of the potential structural evolution.