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Synergies in time-lapse seismic, medical, and space imaging

4th Wave Imaging, Aliso Viejo, California, U.S.

Corresponding author: david.lumley@4thwaveimaging.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

The session "Time-Lapse Imaging and Monitoring" was a highlight of SEG's 2001 Summer Research Workshop, Synergies in Geophysical, Medical, and Space Imaging, because it dealt with techniques that allow various types of image data to be effectively analyzed at repeated snapshot times. The potential payoffs for time-lapse monitoring are impressive—millions of dollars of additional production from oil fields, improved medical diagnoses, and the opportunity to observe important geologic processes on and beneath the earth's surface as they are occurring. This has perhaps been the ultimate dream of earth scientists ever since the origins of this discipline. The basic concept is simple—compare data sets of the same volume or surface acquired at different calendar times. However, as the papers in this session revealed, executing this simple strategy is challenging and many key problems must still be addressed.

During this session, papers were presented on time-lapse monitoring applications that use seismic, medical, and satellite imaging. The technical content can be grouped into five components: seismic monitoring of subsurface fluid flow, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) medical image monitoring of brain responses to patient stimuli, time-lapse SAR satellite imaging of changes on the earth's surface due to natural and man-made phenomena, physical modeling of time-lapse data to quantify images of fluid flow, and next-generation methods to image/invert time-lapse data sets jointly rather than independently.

	Time-lapse seismic imaging

 
David Lumley of 4th Wave Imaging explained the physical basis for time-lapse seismic monitoring of fluid flow, presented state-of-the-art monitoring examples from producing oil fields, and discussed some image-processing challenges caused by nonrepeatable acquisition phenomena in time-lapse data sets.

The time-lapse seismic method (often called 4D seismic) relies on scattering of seismic waves from fluid-flow-related contrasts in subsurface rock and fluid mechanical property distributions. Seismic waves are generated by a seismic source near the earth's surface, typically on land . . . [Full Text of this Article]