What is seismic data management?

What is seismic data management?

Data Management, also known as seismic data management or subsurface data management, simply refers to how oil and gas companies store, organize and access their volumes of geophysical, geological and other subsurface data that they have acquired over time.

How is seismic data stored?

Major oil and gas companies are likely to have seismic data spanning decades and consuming Petabytes (PBs) of storage. This seismic data is often stored across a variety of different storage mediums depending on operational requirements, including: Network-Attached Storage (NAS), Magnetic tapes and USB devices.

What is SEG D?

SEG-D is a specialized format, while SEG-Y is a general-purpose format. In general, SEG-D is intended for field recordings of seismic data, and SEG-Y is intended for ‘seismic data exchange’.

What is seismic data management and why is it important?

Seismic data (pre- or post-stack) and their associated attributes have become so huge that it still represents a major cost-item in any given company’s IT infrastructure. There are two (complementary) strategies for solving the challenge of seismic data management:

Is disk space enough to manage seismic data?

Disk-space is cheap, it is true; but moving data around is not. Seismic data (pre- or post-stack) and their associated attributes have become so huge that it still represents a major cost-item in any given company’s IT infrastructure. There are two (complementary) strategies for solving the challenge of seismic data management:

What is the best way to store your seismic data?

One of the most popular methods has been to store their post-stack seismic in 8-bit format. This, in practice, gave them a 4:1 compression ratio (compared to the segy standard 32-bit float format). This method does have some serious quality issues:

What is seismic compression?

In practice, seismic compression has been a niche tool, only used when the alternative is to transfer data over very slow, or very expensively, for example, through satellite communication at a remote field location.