Numerical and measured data from the 3D salt canopy physical modeling project

The evolution of salt structures in the Gulf of Mexico have been shown to provide a mechanism for the trapping of significant hydrocarbon reserves. Most of these structures have complex geometries relative to the surrounding sedimentary layers. This aspect in addition to high velocities within the salt tend to scatter and defocus seismic energy and make imaging of subsalt lithology extremely difficult. An ongoing program the SEG/EAEG modeling project (Aminzadeh et al. 1994a: Aminzadeh et al. 1994b: Aminzadeh et al. 1995), and a follow-up project funded as part of the Advanced Computational Technology Initiative (ACTI) (House et al. 1996) have sought to investigate problems with imaging beneath complex salt structures using numerical modeling and more recently, construction of a physical model patterned after the numerical subsalt model (Wiley and McKnight. 1996). To date, no direct comparison of the numerical and physical aspects of these models has been attempted. We present the results of forward modeling a numerical realization of the 3D salt canopy physical model with the French Petroleum Institute (IFP) acoustic finite difference algorithm used in the numerical subsalt tests. We compare the results from the physical salt canopy model, the acoustic modeling of the physical/numerical model and the original numerical SEG/EAEG Salt Model. We will be testing the sensitivity of migration to the presence of converted shear waves and acquisition geometry