Publication Name: Eastern Australian Basins Symposium III (EABS 2008)
Authors: P. Boult, B. Freeman, G. Yielding, S. Menpes and L.J. Diekman
Date Published: September 2008
Number of Pages: 10
Abstract:
In faulted reservoirs, structural uncertainty arises from two major sources of error; the systematic error of the seismic method and the human error of the interpreter. When the magnitude of fault displacements is greater than the distance between samples, providing seismic data quality is good, the pattern of faulting is usually clear and may be largely unequivocal. This means the order of error in lateral positioning of structures is approximately the same as the error in the vertical dimension and both are dominantly systematic. This is typical of good quality 3D seismic data. For 2D seismic data, poor quality 3D data and for small faults in 3D data, the pattern of faulting becomes much more of an interpretive issue since fault offsets are small compared with the distances between samples. The balance of the error, or uncertainty, is then strongly one-sided and the effects of systematic errors become secondary to those inherent in the interpreter’s ‘model’.