Master workflow: click a step, jump to its chapter

Part 12 — Processing Workflow Reference Card

Learning objectives

See the full seismic-processing pipeline at a glance, from field acquisition to deliverables
Recognise where the time vs depth migration branch lives and which route suits which problem
Locate the iteration loops (velocity ↔ migration, FWI ↔ velocity) that distinguish production flows from textbook flows
Identify where machine-learning methods (§9) enter the pipeline
Use the card as a navigation map: any step jumps to its chapter

The chapters of this textbook are not independent — they fit together as a pipeline. This reference card renders that pipeline as a clickable graph. Before an exam, or when planning a processing project, come back here and trace the route you will actually take.

How to read the diagram

Main flow (top to bottom): the typical order in which steps are applied, from raw shot gathers to the final stack and inversion products.
Time vs depth migration fork: choose time migration for fast structural imaging in mild-velocity regimes; choose depth migration when lateral velocity contrasts require honest depth-domain imaging. Real projects often do both.
Iteration loops: velocity and migration are not one-shot — residual moveout on migrated common-image gathers feeds back into tomographic velocity updates (§5.9). FWI similarly updates the velocity model used for the next depth migration (§6.5).
ML touchpoints: dashed chips mark where Part 9 methods enter the flow — first-break picking, denoising, trace interpolation, FWI acceleration. None of these replace physics; they speed up the steps you would do anyway.
Optional 4D branch: dashed box. Runs only for time-lapse projects, in which baseline and monitor surveys are processed jointly (§8.4) before a difference volume is computed.

Using the card

Hover any phase to see its description and sub-topics in the detail panel. Click the phase title to jump to its chapter overview; click any sub-step chip to jump to the exact section. The right-hand column lists the two iteration loops, the four main ML touchpoints, and a quick link to each of the six real-field capstones.

What this card is not

It is not a recipe. Production flows differ by basin, data vintage, and objective: a 4D monitoring survey in a brownfield has little in common with a frontier sub-salt exploration survey. The boxes are universal; the ordering, parameters, and iteration counts are project-specific. Use the capstones in Part 10 to see how the same graph instantiates differently across real projects.

Having reached this card, you have crossed the threshold from “I have heard of these steps” to “I know what each does, why it is there, and what happens if it goes wrong.” That is the definition of processing fluency this textbook set out to deliver.

References

Yilmaz, Ö. (2001). Seismic Data Analysis (2 vols.). SEG.
Sheriff, R. E., Geldart, L. P. (1995). Exploration Seismology (2nd ed.). Cambridge UP.
Claerbout, J. F. (1976). Fundamentals of Geophysical Data Processing. McGraw-Hill.
Etgen, J., Gray, S. H., Zhang, Y. (2009). An overview of depth imaging in exploration geophysics. Geophysics, 74, WCA5.