ErSE 214- Seismic Exploration, during Fall
Instructor: Tariq Alkhalifah, Ph.D.-Professor, Building: 1 Room 3308 tariq.alkhalifah@kaust.edu.sa
Lab Instructor: Mohammad Zuberi – Seismic Processor, Room 3208 mohammad.zuberi@kaust.edu.sa
Lecture: Saturday and Monday
Lab: Wednesday
Text: Introduction to Petroleum Seismology by Luc T. Ikelle and Lasse Amundsen
Texts can be ordered through the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG).
Grading: Lecture activities will represent 50% of the final course grade. There will be one (final) exam in the lecture part of the course. Labs and homework will represent the remaining 50% of the final course grade and will consist of a series of lab exercises designed to teach how to develop an exploration-style seismic reflection code. Individual lab exercises (10%) will be designed to complement our progress in class and it will include codes to achieve parts of what learned. These exercises are preparatory for the understanding of the concept that is compiled into a final formally written report (40%) that will be submitted at the end of the course.
Course Calendar and Outline
First day of class - Saturday, September 3, 2010
Overview - This course is devoted to the concept of reflection seismology data processing for exploration purposes. The objective of seismic exploration is to observe the inherent physical reaction of the Earth to vibrations and paint a picture of the Earth's subsurface from such observations, hopefully, without the need to drill. Seismic exploration includes to main parts: Seismic data acquisition and Seismic data processing and imaging. This course is devoted more to seismic processing, as seismic processing is a procedure in which we transform raw seismic data acquired at the field to an image of the subsurface in that area. It consists mainly of a series of computer programs applied to the seismic data with tasks that range from filtering to wave equation-based imaging. The last 80 years, the seismic reflection business has evolved into a very sophisticated combination of geology, physics, information theory, mathematics, and computer science that employs tens of thousands of scientists around the world. The course textbook is relatively a new publication from the SEG that is smaller, cheaper, and more traditional in organization than the text used by most others (by Oz Yilmaz). The fine text by Yilmaz will also be available and used as an additional reference. Both texts represent the state of the practice of this applied science. Both texts (especially Yilmaz) place the mathematics of many of the procedures into appendices and imbedded text boxes and instead use physical and image-based methods to explain concepts. Following this example, since this course will examine as much of this science as possible, I will limit mathematical developments to what is needed to understand the underlying process (e.g., Wiener Filtering, convolution, cross-correlation, etc.).
Lecture Schedule:
Department of Physical Science and Engineering 4700 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Thuwal 23955-6900 Saudi Arabia