Wave propagation effects on amplitude variation with offset measurements: A modeling study

Wave propagation effects can significantly affect amplitude variation with offset (AVO) measurements. These effects include spreading losses, transmission losses, interbed multiples, surface multiple reflections, P‐SV mode converted waves and inelastic attenuation. Examination of prestack elastic synthetic seismograms suggests that spreading losses and the transmission losses plus compressional interbed multiples are manifest mainly as a time and offset effect on the primary reflections. The surface related multiples and the P‐SV mode‐converted waves interfere with prestack amplitudes inducing distortions in the AVO pattern. Such distortions cause large variances in AVO model fitting. Prestack viscoelastic synthetic seismograms also suggest that inelastic attenuation further complicates the AVO response because of the offset and time variant amplitude decay effects and the phase change due to dispersion. Together, all these effects severely alter AVO behavior and result in serious errors in AVO parameter estimates being made from inadequately corrected seismograms. This modeling study suggests that time and offset dependent data processing prior to AVO analysis would be necessary to correct for the wave propagation effects, via either inverse filtering or model based approaches. Comparisons between acoustic and elastic synthetic seismograms show that corrections for the wave propagation effects derived using acoustic approximations are inadequate. Corrections need to be calculated based on elastic approximations provided that the inelastic attenuation effects have been previously removed.