A new approach to quantitative azimuthal inversion for stress and fracture detection.

A method is described to allow quantitative usage of isotropic modeling and inversion in anisotropic media. Based on the Rüger reflectivity equations for HTI media transforms are designed for the elastic parameters used in pre-stack inversion. The transformed elastic parameters can be used in isotropic forward modeling and inversion to exactly mimic the anisotropic reflectivity behavior of the seismic data. The proposed method allows us to close the loop between well log data and seismic inversion results without having to revert to experimental anisotropic inversion algorithms. In this paper a synthetic feasibility study will be shown, indicating that we can exactly predict the outcome of a wide azimuth (WAZ) seismic inversion experiment based on isotropic elastic parameters and Thomsen’s anisotropy parameters.