Publications

Salvo: Seismic imaging software for complex geologies

Ober, Curtis C.; Womble, David E.

This report describes Salvo, a three-dimensional seismic-imaging software for complex geologies. Regions of complex geology, such as overthrusts and salt structures, can cause difficulties for many seismic-imaging algorithms used in production today. The paraxial wave equation and finite-difference methods used within Salvo can produce high-quality seismic images in these difficult regions. However this approach comes with higher computational costs which have been too expensive for standard production. Salvo uses improved numerical algorithms and methods, along with parallel computing, to produce high-quality images and to reduce the computational and the data input/output (I/O) costs. This report documents the numerical algorithms implemented for the paraxial wave equation, including absorbing boundary conditions, phase corrections, imaging conditions, phase encoding, and reduced-source migration. This report also describes I/O algorithms for large seismic data sets and images and parallelization methods used to obtain high efficiencies for both the computations and the I/O of seismic data sets. Finally, this report describes the required steps to compile, port and optimize the Salvo software, and describes the validation data sets used to help verify a working copy of Salvo.