McMC-based nonlinear EIVAZ inversion driven by rock physics

A single set of vertically aligned fractures embedded in a purely isotropic background medium may be considered as a long-wavelength effective transversely isotropic medium with a horizontal symmetry axis (HTI). The estimation of fracture weaknesses is essential for characterizing the anisotropy in HTI media. Using the fractured anisotropic rock-physics models and the wide-azimuth seismic data, elastic impedance inversion variation with incident angle and azimuth, or simply 'EIVAZ' for short, can be carried out for the estimation of the normal and tangential fracture weaknesses with the nonlinear Markov chain Monte Carlo (McMC) strategy. Firstly, an inversion method of nonlinear anisotropic elastic impedance (AEI) with the McMC algorithm was proposed, which is used for the inversion of nonlinear AEI information with different angles of incidence and azimuth. Then we extracted the normal and tangential fracture weaknesses directly using the ratio differences of inverted nonlinear AEI data. So we can eliminate the influence of the isotropic background elastic impedance on the anisotropic perturbation elastic impedance and obtain the normal and tangential fracture weaknesses more stably. A test on a 2D over-thrust model shows that the fracture weaknesses are still estimated reasonably with moderate noise. A test on a real data set demonstrates that the estimated results are in good agreement with the results of the well log interpretation, and our McMC-based nonlinear AEI approach appears to be a stable method for predicting fracture weaknesses. (paper)