Synthetic P-P and P-SV cross sections

Gary F. Margrave, Darren S. Foltinek

A new numerical seismic modeling facility has been developed which implements the SYNTH algorithm (Howell et al) to create P-P or P-SV offset gathers from well log information. The new facility extends the previous SYNTH functionality in that a cross section of well logs may be input (P sonic, S sonic, and density), a gather is created at each log location, the gathers are then stacked to produce a P-P or P-SV cross section. The full Zoeppritz equations, with raytraced incident angles, are used to model the offset dependent reflectivity effects. A great variety of wavelet options allow simulation of various source and bandwidth effects and near surface ghosting. This facility has been developed within the Matlab scientific programming environment which means that the code is relatively robust and easily ported to almost any hardware platform. Logedit and Logsec, which are commercially available Matlab packages for editing well logs and interpolating logs along cross sections, are used to prepare the well log cross sections.