Joint Acoustic Inversion of Seismic Reflection and High Density RMS Velocity Data

We present a joint, coupled velocity-density formulation of the acoustic seismic inversion problem, adapted from a previously-published deterministic geostatistical inversion scheme. This formulation allows the simultaneous inversion of both seismic reflection data and high-density RMS velocity picks, without the need to impose a fixed velocity-density relationship. A realistic synthetic test case, strongly based on a North Sea chalk field, is used to demonstrate the characteristics of the method. The resulting model shows not only improved resolution and bandwidth recovery compared to inversion of reflection data alone, but also may be used for high-resolution time-to-depth conversion.