Seismic amplitude balancing

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owners.
Scenario:
Processing or acquisition problems sometimes mean that 2D or 3D seismic
displays large areas of washed-out amplitude and regional areas of strong
amplitude.
Amplitude balancing may want to be performed on the cube or 2D line so that auto-
tracking can be performed.
There is an option in the blueback geophysics toolbox but this may not be available
to the client

Solution:
Use the volume attributes and the seismic calculator in Petrel to perform your own
amplitude balancing by dividing the original seismic by the average amplitude over a
large window.
Step 1 Calculate RMS amplitude

1. Right-click seismic cube and the

volume attributes (or double-click from
the processes pane)
2. Choose the RMS Amplitude attribute
3. Set the window to the maximum value
of 100 in the parameters tab.

This calculates the root mean squared

average amplitude over a window of 100ms.
Because of squaring, this will always
produce positive values.
Step 2 Smooth the RMS amplitude cube
1. Use the structural smoothing volume attribute with the RMS amplitude
as the input to calculate a cube with smooth transitions between
average amplitude
2. Use the interactive parameter control to visually select the desired X,
Y, and Z sigma values.
Step 3 Create the amplitude balanced cube

1. Divide the original reflection cube with the smoothed RMS amplitude cube
(replacing the following expression with the correct cube names):

Amp_balanced=Original/RMSsmoothed
Step 4 Co-visualise result in an interpretation window
1. Draw a seismic ghost the same size as the
interpretation viewport.
2. With the ghost active (bold) in the windows pane,
select the same inline/xline from the smoothed
RMS cube.
3. Change the opacity of the seismic ghost to
overlay on the amplitude balanced reflection
1 cube beneath.
4. If required, change the template of the smoothed
2 RMS cube to surface attribute and edit the
min/max in the colour pallette.

3
4

2
Results
Original Result

The resulting cube has the smoothed RMS amplitude cube overlaid with transparency to help visualize
areas where amplitude has been boosted (purple) relative to reduced amplitudes (yellow). Be aware
that the amplitudes of the new cube are no longer comparable to the original.