Patent Document ID: 9977141
Application ID: 14818958
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A scientific method for transforming seismic data into a subsurface physical property model, comprising: constructing the subsurface physical property model by performing tomographic inversion of the seismic data, using a computer, with residual depth errors reconstructed using property scanning; wherein the physical property is one of velocity, a vector component of velocity, one or more anisotropy parameters, and any other property of a medium that affects a kinematic property of propagation of acoustic waves, wherein the residual depth errors are reconstructed using the following relationship at each imaging point 
 DA(v m -v f ) where A is a matrix built from ray tracing, v m is a base migration model of the property, v f is a model of the property as picked from a property scan of migrated seismic data, and deviation operator D is defined by its operation on an arbitrary n-dimensional vector a={a j }: ( Da ) j = a j - ∑ i ⁢ a i n where indices i and j denote different source-receiver offsets among a total of n offsets present in the migrated seismic data, wherein the property model is constructed by computing an update to the base migration model, said update Δv being given by solving 
 (DA)Δv=Dz m where z m is migrated depth, and wherein the property scanning includes, choosing a suite of property models, generating tables of depth errors for each property model in the suite using the matrix A, forming images by migrating the seismic data using each property model in the suite, picking a focusing property at a plurality of image points, and using the tables of depth errors, finding a depth error that corresponds to each focusing property.