Master workflow: trace your project through the route

The chapters of this textbook are not independent; they fit together as one route. This reference card draws that route as a map. Before an exam, or when planning a processing project, pick the project closest to yours and trace the stations you will actually visit.

How to read the map

• Main line: the stations in the order in which they act on the data, from acquisition through geometry and statics, amplitude and noise, deconvolution, demultiple and velocity analysis to NMO and stack. Foundations (Part 0) sits above the line and Test yourself (Part 11) below it.
• Depth and time imaging fork: after the stack the route splits. Time migration is fast and right while velocity varies slowly sideways; depth migration is needed when lateral velocity contrasts are strong, as under salt. Real projects often do both.
• Iteration loops: four arcs on the left rail. Residual statics feed back from the stack to velocity picking (Section 2.4); a first velocity pick feeds Radon demultiple and is picked again afterwards (Section 4.3); residual moveout on migrated common-image gathers drives tomographic velocity updates (Section 5.9); and FWI updates the velocity model used for the next depth migration (Sections 6.1 and 6.2), while Section 6.5 shows how to check that the update is real.
• ML touchpoints: badges show where Part 9 methods enter the route: first-break picking, denoising, trace reconstruction and FWI acceleration. None of these replaces physics; they speed up steps you would do anyway.
• The 4D branch: a dashed line from acquisition down the right side. It runs only for time-lapse projects, in which baseline and monitor surveys go through the same route together (Section 8.4) and end in a difference volume judged by NRMS (Section 8.3).

Using the card

Select any station (click, tap, or the arrow keys) to read what it does, what goes in and what comes out, what breaks if you skip it, and which sections teach it; the links in its card open those sections. Then choose a project and see which stations it visits. The land vibroseis route of Section 10.1 visits 10 of the 13 processing stations and runs 2 loops, and it leans hardest on geometry and statics and on the stack. Force the OBN sub-salt route to time imaging and the sentence above the map says why that project breaks.

Plate (b) follows one synthetic CMP gather down the main line. As recorded it keeps 23 % of its energy through the stack; refraction statics raise that to 30 %, amplitude recovery and noise attenuation to 82 %, and demultiple to 86 %. Deconvolution alone lowers it to 78 %, because whitening lifts high-frequency noise along with the signal band, so the gather's signal-to-noise ratio falls: each station fixes one thing and can expose another.

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 stations are universal; the ordering, parameters, and iteration counts are project-specific. Use the capstones in Part 10 to see how the same map instantiates differently across real projects.

If you can trace your own project through this card and say why each station is there and what breaks when it is skipped, you have the processing fluency this book set out to build.

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.