LAUSR

ABSTRACTSeismic characterization of carbonate reservoirs is a challenging task for geophysicists because of their special depositional environment and complex interior structures. We developed a case study of the seismic characterization of a karstified carbonate reservoir in the Tarim Basin, western China. The characterization procedure is sequential and includes fault and fracture detection, seismic facies classification, seismic impedance inversion, and lithofacies classification. We presented a dip-steered coherence algorithm for detecting faults and karst fractures in the carbonate reservoir. Incorporating the dip information improves the performance and robustness. We applied normalized seismic segments, rather than the amplitude values, as the input to seismic facies classification, so as to reduce the impact of strong amplitudes, such as karst fractures, and to enable the analysis of weak amplitudes in the background strata. For the impedance inversion, we adopted a Fourier integral method for fas...