Mapping Seismic Inversion Uncertainties With an Application to Time Lapse Data

A geostatistical method is used to generate a family of petrophysical models of the subsurface from which synthetic seismic traces are computed. Comparison of these synthetic traces with the actual seismic trace selects the petrophysical models that are explaining the seismic data. From these selected models, the uncertainty of an inversion is obtained. The method is applied to investigate the errors introduced in the petrophysical models when the inversion is performed with a wavelet that is not representative for the seismic data. Next, the method is applied on time-lapse seismic data to invert for small production introduced changes under the level of inversion uncertainty.