Application of common reflection surface (CRS) to velocity variation with azimuth (VVAz) inversion of the relatively narrow azimuth 3D seismic land data

The fracture direction and its intensity are critical properties related to hydrocarbon characterization and identification. Both these properties have an essential role in identifying the direction of hydrocarbon migration, determining the sweet spot area, and optimizing the drilling design. The velocity variation with azimuth (VVAz) is a well-known method to estimate the fracture direction and its intensity. This method is of widespread interest because it predicts the properties based on seismic data without any practical constraints. Despite this interest, the technique requires rich azimuth 3D seismic data in our case, which is rare. This study aims to apply regularization and interpolation by including the wave front attributes based on the Common Reflection Surface (CRS) method before the VVAz inversion. The motivation of using the CRS method is to enrich the current azimuth of the 3D seismic data and improve the S/N ratio. The synthetic and the real 3D seismic data are evaluated to examine the interpolation scheme of the proposed CRS method’s performance. Based on the evaluation of the 3D seismic data after regularization, the amplitude versus offset (AVO) phenomena, and the VVAz inversion results are relatively consistent (or matched) with the model. A similar result is found for the case of real 3D seismic data. A significant positive correlation between the fracture intensity of FMI and the real seismic data of about 0.9 is obtained. Therefore, CRS can be used as a regularization and interpolation method before the VVAz inversion of the relatively narrow azimuth 3D seismic data.