Seismic Forward Modeling of Sub-Volcanic Zones

Abstract

The seismic survey is a leading geophysical technique in the location of potential hydrocarbon and geothermal reservoirs beneath the Earth’s surface. However, there might be some cases, when the method is inadequate for the reflection imaging of subsurface geology. In this paper, the areas of Nyírség and Szatmár-Bereg counties are presented, where the traditional, short-offset PdPu-reflection seismic measurement was unsuccessful because of the lithological character and spatial position of the geological formations. All this is due to a thick buried Miocene igneous complex, which forms a strong barrier for wave propagation and causes uncertainties during the interpretation of the pre-Neogene basement. The primary purpose of the study is to summarize and introduce the regional deep geology, to construct multi-layered, complex geological-geophysical models based on the available dataset and to evaluate the possibilities of their seismic reflection imaging. In course of this procedure, forward modeling is utilized to reveal the reasons behind the weak subvolcanic amplitudes and which results allow to propose a new strategy for measurement design.