Predicting the economic impact of acquisition artifacts and noise

Abstract

Decisions that involve trade-offs between data quality and cost arise frequently in seismic acquisition. Improvements in data quality are always desirable, but they usually involve increased cost. To justify spending more money to acquire higher quality data, we need to show that the higher data quality has economic benefits that offset any increased expense. This article shows how we can use value of information (VOI) analysis and probabilistic modeling to quantify the economic value of seismic data, and to predict the economic consequences of changes in data quality.