Quantifying Uncertainty in Velocity Models using Bayesian Methods

Quanitifying uncertainty in models derived from observed data is a major issue. Public and political understanding of uncertainty is poor and for industry inadequate assessment of risk costs money. In this talk we will examine the geological structure of the subsurface, however our principal exploration tool, controlled source seismology, gives its data in time. Inversion tools exist to map these data into a depth model but a full exploration of the uncertainty of the model is rarely done because robust strategies do not exist for large non-linear complex systems. There are two principal sources of uncertainty: the first comes from the input data which is noisy and bandlimited; the second, and more sinister, is from the model parameterisation and forward algorithms themselves, which approximate to the physics to make the problem tractable. To address these issues we propose a Bayesian approach. One philosophy is to estimate the uncertainty in a possible model derived using standard inversion tools. During the inversion stage we can use our geological prejudice to derive an acceptable model. Then we use a local random walk using the Metropolis- Hastings algorithm to explore the model space immediately around a possible solution. For models with a limited number of parameters we can use the forward modeling step from the inversion code. However as the number of parameters increase and/or the cost of the forward modeling step becomes significant, we need to use fast emulators to act as proxies so a sufficient number of iterations can be performed on which to base our statistical measures of uncertainty. In this presentation we show examples of uncertainty estimation using both pre- and post-critical seismic data. In particular, we will demonstrate uncertainty introduced by the approximation of the physics by using a tomographic inversion of bandlimited data and show that uncertainty increases as the central frequency of the data decreases. This is consistent with the infinite frequency approximation in the tomographic modeling step becoming increasing compromised.