Seismic attenuation in finely layered porous rocks; effects of fluid flow and scattering

Abstract

Abstract Scattering caused by fine layering is known to play an important role in seismic attenuation. If the rock is also porous and permeable, additional attenuation can be caused by a flow of the pore fluid induced by the passing wave (see e.g., White, 1983). At frequencies higher than 100 kHz, standard Biot's attenuation (Biot, 1962; Bourbie et al., 1987) may also contribute to the overall attenuation in a layered poroelastic rock. While standard Biot's attenuation has been well known for decades, the effects of scattering by fine layering and interlayer flow have been studied extensively both theoretically and numerically in recent years. However, in all theoretical approaches proposed thus far, these effects have been treated separately: scattering was studied for purely elastic rocks (Burridge and Chang, 1989; Shapiro et al. 1994), while attenuation caused by interlayer flow was considered either for periodically stratified media that causes no scattering (Norris, 1993) or for frequencies at which scattering is negligible (Gurevich and Lopatnikov, 1995).