Caravel

Caravel and its companion tools, Formatter and S.E.A comprise the Seismic Analysis System.

Driven in particular by the almost universal acceptance and utilization of AVO, explorationists recognize that prestack seismic data represent a vast domain of untapped information. However, a major obstacle to the routine consideration of prestack data is that there are very few commercially available tools that enable the synchronization of prestack and poststack data in the same environment. Certainly the tight integration of prestack and poststack data is not feasible with interpretation workstations, which, in general, only support stacked data. It was this fact that drove the initial development of the Seismic Analysis System.

Caravel is the Seismic Analysis System's data analysis and visualization module. It is built on the Formatter data access system which provides direct data links between poststack and prestack data. Interpreters can access data from any direction and in any order (click image on right for further details). Point-and-click on a stacked trace to retrieve a prestack gather or directly extract a common offset panel from a 3-D prestack volume. Caravel contains several major attribute analysis routines, including Energy Absorption Analysis for detecting seismic attenuation as a possible hydrocarbon and lithology indicator. Also included are data conditioning algorithms for enhancing the quality of data before attribute analysis. Caravel is an ideal platform for performing a rapid reconnaissance of large data sets, comparing stacked and prestack data and interactively analyzing the data with meaningful high-resolution seismic attributes.

The foundation of the Seismic Analysis System, Formatter is a seismic data access system that is completely unlike any conventional architecture. Formatter solves the problem of working with data in different formats and provides direct seismic data access, not just sequential access as conventional systems do. As a data management tool, Formatter becomes a Seismic Data Switchboard, allowing data management personnel to move seismic data across the company's E&P software products, independent of data format differences. Interpreters value Formatter for its ability to directly access and extract subsets of large data volumes, both poststack and prestack, for further interpretation within the Seismic Analysis System or for export to popular interpretation software systems.

Seismic Energy Analysis (SEA) is the tightly integrated, batch processing counterpart of Caravel. S.E.A. and Caravel share interface layout and data analysis options, but where Caravel is designed for interactive work sessions, S.E.A. is used primarily for processing large data volumes. Caravel passes parameter files directly to S.E.A., so the data conditioning and attribute parameters selected during the Caravel session can be applied to the batch processing of 2-D and 3-D data sets within S.E.A. Data processed within S.E.A. are written to disk for export to interpretation or 3-D visualization packages, or accessed by Caravel for further analysis.