A blind interpretation of drill‐bit signals
The role of kurtosis in evaluating the quality of vertical seismic profiling (VSP) drill‐bit data is investigated. The calculations show how kurtosis depends on the dominant frequency, bandwidth, and phase content of a seismic signal. This analysis is applied to synthetic and real common‐offset and common‐shot drill‐bit seismograms to evaluate the prominence and quality of the first arrival and other coherent events. High values of kurtosis correspond to an isolated first arrival or to a compressed coherent noise event, while low values are typical of low S/N (distributed) ratio traces. Kurtosis analysis applied to drill‐bit VSP data while drilling proved to be successful at identifying high‐quality traces with little interpretational input.