In the energy industry, an understanding of subsurface characteristics and structure is crucial to identifying and localizing untapped resources. At a high level, the process of taking an entirely unexplored region of earth and generating an actionable understanding of its structure includes:
- Seismic data collection
- Seismic data preprocessing
- Seismic migration and velocity model construction
- Seismic interpretation
Data Provided
- A set of synthetic (but realistic) velocity models, generated from a single, synthetic, ground truth. That is, each of these velocity models could realistically be expected to be true for a given region of Earth.
- For each of those velocity models, a realization (i.e., seismic volume) derived by running the corresponding seismic traces through a seismic migration kernel using the corresponding velocity model as an estimate of subsurface velocity.
- For each of those velocity models, the gathers for all offset pairs in the synthetic survey.
Data Challenge Goals
Construct an uncertainty map for a given seismic survey, labeling each pixel in a final 2D seismic image with a value between 0.0 and 1.0, indicating how volatile the estimate for that pixel is.
Challenge Questions
- Given that geophysicists generally use horizontal lines in gathers as a good indicator of velocity model accuracy, build a model (analytical, mathematical, data-driven, or other format) to estimate the quality of each velocity model based on its associated gathers.
- Train a model to label each pixel with an uncertainty value between 0.0 and 1.0, indicating how uncertain any given realization of that part of the subsurface is.
- Generate a single uncertainty map given all of the velocity models, realizations, and gathers at hand.
- Generate of visualizations of this uncertainty map of the subsurface.
Download the PDF-file to learn more about seismic surveys.
