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Continuous time-varying Q-factor estimation method in the time-frequency domain

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Abstract

The Q-factor is an important physical parameter for characterizing the absorption and attenuation of seismic waves propagating in underground media, which is of great significance for improving the resolution of seismic data, oil and gas detection, and reservoir description. In this paper, the local centroid frequency is defined using shaping regularization and used to estimate the Q values of the formation. We propose a continuous time-varying Q-estimation method in the time-frequency domain according to the local centroid frequency, namely, the local centroid frequency shift (LCFS) method. This method can reasonably reduce the calculation error caused by the low accuracy of the time picking of the target formation in the traditional methods. The theoretical and real seismic data processing results show that the time-varying Q values can be accurately estimated using the LCFS method. Compared with the traditional Q-estimation methods, this method does not need to extract the top and bottom interfaces of the target formation; it can also obtain relatively reasonable Q values when there is no effective frequency spectrum information. Simultaneously, a reasonable inverse Q. filtering result can be obtained using the continuous time-varying Q values.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Liu Guochang of China University of Petroleum (Beijing) for his discussion and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Yang Liu.

Additional information

This work was supported by The National Key Research and Development Program (No. 2016YFC0600505 and 2018YFC0603701), National Natural Science Foundation (No. 41974134 and 41774127).

Wang Qing-Han, is a PhD student at Jilin University. Her main research interests are seismic resolution enhancing and seismic data processing.

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Wang, QH., Liu, Y., Liu, C. et al. Continuous time-varying Q-factor estimation method in the time-frequency domain. Appl. Geophys. 17, 844–856 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11770-020-0869-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11770-020-0869-8

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