ErSE260

Course website:https://sites.google.com/a/kaust.edu.sa/erse260/

ErSE 260- Seismic Imaging, during Spring

Instructor: Tariq Alkhalifah, Ph.D.-Professor, Building: 1 Room 3308 tariq.alkhalifah@kaust.edu.sa

TA and Lab Instructor: Xuxin Ma/Mohammad Zuberi – Room 3208 mohammad.zuberi@kaust.edu.sa

Lecture: Saturday 1:00-2:30PM, Monday12:00-1:00PM

Office hours: Saturday 4:00-5:00PM, Monday 2:00PM-3:00PM

Text: Course notes + Theory of Seismic imaging authored by John Scales: http://samizdat.mines.edu/imaging/.

Grading: Exams will represent 50% of the final course grade. There will be one midterm exam and one (final) exam in the lecture part of the course. Homework and a final project will represent the remaining 50% of the final course grade and will consist of a series of homework exercises designed to help you learn the essence of seismic imaging. Individual homework 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 - Sunday, Feb. 5th, 2012

Overview - This course is devoted to the concept of seismic imaging for exploration purposes. We introduce seismic imaging in the framework of Green’s functions and wavefield extrapolation and discuss the various imaging conditions. We look at the various migration methods including Kirchhoff, phase-shift migration, Downward continuation methods, reverse time migration, and others. We discuss the role that velocity plays in the seismic imaging process.

Lecture Schedule:

Week 1 (Feb. 5th): Introduction to Seismic imaging

Week 2 (Feb. 12th): Wavefields and Wave propagation

Week 3 (Feb. 19th): Wavefields to Wavefronts

Week 4 (Feb. 26th): Modeling and the forward problem-exploding reflector

Week 5 (Mar. 4th): The concept of seismic imaging- the adjoint and the imaging condition

Week 6 (Mar. 11th): Integral imaging-Kirchhoff

Week (Mar. 18th): Time migration and Imaging in the Fourier domain (Plane waves)

Week 7 (Mar. 25th): Zero-offset to Prestack- Midterm Exam

Week 8 (Apr. 1st): Spring Break

Week 9 (Apr. 8th): Wave equation methods and Downward continuation

Week 10 (Apr. 15th): Reverse time migration

Week 11 (April 24th): The velocity issue, image/angle gathers and MVA

Week 12 (May 1st): Exploding reflector modeling and migration-prestack

Week 13 (May 8th): Waveform inversion and LSQ migration

Week 14 (May 15th): Final exams.