Questioning the basics of surface-consistent scaling
Peter W. Cary, Nirupama Nagarajappa · 2013
Surface-consistent scaling has been a standard step in the processing of land seismic data for many years, especially in the preparation of pre-stack data for AVO analysis and inversion. Despite the fact that this type of process is in such common use, we believe that there is a basic problem with how the surface-consistent scaling equations are normally solved that results in scalars that are biased by variable levels of random noise in the data. Instead of scaling the energy of the signal in a surface-consistent manner, the normal scaling algorithm scales the energy of the signal plus random noise in a surface-consistent manner. In this abstract we begin by showing evidence of incorrect amplitude scaling of the seismic signal on a real data example after the normal surface-consistent scaling process has been applied. An explanation for the poor scaling is then proposed with the aid of synthetic data that includes both surface-consistent signal and surface-consistent noise. Finally, a simple unbiased method for solving the surface-consistent scaling equations is proposed.