seated(l-r): Ru-Shan Wu, Thorne Lay. Standing(l-r): Ling Zhang, Xiao-Bi Xie, Eli Silver, Lian-Jie Huang.

The ACTI Project at UCSC

Institute of Tectonics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Project Summary

ACTI(Advanced Computational Technology Initiative), sponsored by US Dept. of Energy (DOE), is designed to increase the competitiveness of domestic natural gas and oil companies, and to decrease the Nation's dependence of foreign oil. The ACTI project at UCSC "Fast 3D Prestack Depth Migration Using Multi-Screen Wave Propagators" is part of a major ACTI project "New Methods for Modeling and Processing Seismic Data" in which UCSC is involved in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Colorado Schools of Mines, Massachussetts Institute of Technology and 16 industrial partners, including oil and gas companies, geophysical service companies and computer companies.

The goal of our project is to apply and further develop the multi-screen (phase-screen for acoustic waves, complex-screen for elastic waves) algorithms as propagators for 3D pre-stack depth migration in laterally inhomogeneous media. The so-called 3D pre-stack depth migration method for processing seismic field data is a three-dimensional subsurface high-resolution imaging technique for the case of complex subsurface structure, such as the petroleum related structures in the Gulf of Mexico. The screen propagators adopt a fast dual-domain technique, and is two or three orders of magnitude faster than the traditional finite difference method. In addition, it offers to evolve into a fast method for doing fully elastic 3D modeling, which is a method to predict seismic data for known complex structures. The basic framework for using the multi-screen method to model elastic wave propagation in complex media has been developed by Wu (1994) and an approach for using the method for prestack migration (3D imaging) has been developed and rudimentarily tested by Wu and Xie (1994) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An acoustic wave version for modeling and imaging (migration) has been also developed by Wu and Huang (1992, 1995). The effort now at UCSC is concentrated on the development and assesment of the multi-screen method for fast 3D imaging and modeling in seismic exploration. This project is closely related to other projects in the 3D Seismic Imaging Program.

Director and Principal Investigator: Ru-Shan Wu
Co-Principal investigators: Thorne Lay, Eli Silver.
Research Scientists: Xiao-Bi Xie, Lian-Jie Huang, Ling Zhang, Shengwen Jin.

Collaborators: MIT, LANL

Industrial Partners:

Go to ACTI Project at UCSC

Mail comments and suggestions to jin@earthsci.ucsc.edu
Shengwen Jin / last update: 09/02/97
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