Anisotropic model building with well control

Anisotropic depth model building using surface seismic data alone is non-unique and one of the major reasons is that there is ambiguity among the anisotropy parameters. Additional well data can help reduce such ambiguity and thus yield a more accurate anisotropic model for depth imaging. In this paper, we present a tomographic modelbuilding approach that uses well data together with surface seismic data. It consists of four major steps: preparing data, estimating the local anisotropic parameters at the well locations, extrapolating the local parameters to generate a volumetric anisotropic model for further tomographic update, and finally tomographic updating with well control.