Guided seismic-to-well tying based on dynamic time warping

Abstract

We present a semi-automatic alternative to the manual seismic-to-well tie. In the conventional procedure, the interpreter first creates a synthetic trace from edited well logs, determines the most appropriate bulk shift and polarity, and then applies the minimum amount of stretching and squeezing to best match the observed data. The last step can be compared with a visual pattern recognition step which often requires some experience. We replace the last step with constrained dynamic time warping to help guide the interpreter. The method automatically determines the appropriate amount of local stretching and squeezing to produce the highest correlation between the original data and the created synthetic trace. Results compare well with manual seismic-to-well ties; yet we advise against unsupervised applications as the method is intended as a guide instead of a fully automated blind approach.