Synthetics Overview

Insight has a built-in synthetic seismogram feature in which you can define a model of the subsurface for deriving a series of artificial seismic traces. These can be compared to the actual seismic data and used to relate reflectors to their corresponding layers and formations.

As prerequisites to use Synthetics, you should have the following loaded to Insight:

  • seismic volumes (time-domain) in .dugio format
  • well log data
  • wavelets.

Note: Insight's Synthetics feature does not accept depth volumes to generate synthetics. Perform a Time/Depth Conversion to convert the depth volume to time.

Tip: You can view remote well data loaded from Petrel in Insight (see Linking Insight and Petrel for more information about sharing data across Petrel and Insight).

Exploring synthetics

Once you have loaded the above items, go to the Tool menu in the Control Panel and select Synthetics to open the view. See Using the Synthetics Window for descriptions of all the panels of the Synthetics Window.

In the Synthetics window navigation bar, select the well to display the log curves, checkshots and synthetics.

Refer to the following links to configure your synthetics:

  • Configuring Synthetics — Configure the synthetics based on angle stacks and wavelets (see Creating a Wavelet) for the well.
  • Defining Log Curves — Define your P slowness, S slowness and density curves from the Wells tab of the Synthetics window. Where the curves contain undefined points, you can use a custom equation or a standard equation to help Insight fill in the missing points.
  • Applying Sequential Backus Averaging — This page explains the steps to apply Sequential Backus Averaging to the calculation of the well log RFCs.
  • Overriding Wavelets — Instead of using the default wavelets in Configuring Synthetics, you can optionally override the defaults with different wavelets in the Well tab.

Once you have your logs and synthetics configured, you can view the various logs and synthetic amplitudes in the well log panel and the synthetics-seismic panel respectively. In the Tracks and Curves section of the View tab, toggle the round button to amber/green to hide/show the logs on the track, and adjust the view of the Synthetics window to your preference (see Defining View Settings).

In the Synthetics window, the Time/Depth pairs (checkshots) are symbolized by a horizontal line in the checkshot panel and tracks. See Editing Time/Depth Pairs to manually add/edit/delete them.

Instead of using the default display window settings and window of interest for all the wells as defined in Defining View Settings, you can define the display window settings and window of interest for a specific well. This is optional and will override the default settings. For more information, see:

For more information on displaying specific curves on the tracks, see:

To view the synthetic curves against the seismic in section views, see:

The Synthetics Analysis Table allows for analysis of misties between the well synthetics and seismic synthetics (see Statistical Analysis of Synthetics). To view the analysis table, open the Synthetic tab from the Synthetics window. In the Analysis section, click Show Analysis Table. Alternatively, open the Tool menu in Insight’s main Control Panel, and select Synthetics Analysis Table.

To export the synthetics or seismic traces. see Exporting Synthetics/Seismic Traces.