Application of instantaneous rotations to S-wave vertical seismic profiling

Abstract The petroleum exploration industry uses S-wave vertical seismic profiling (VSP) to determine S-wave velocities from downgoing direct arrivals, and S-wave reflectivities from upgoing waves. Seismic models for quantitative calibration of amplitude variation with offset (AVO) data require S-wave velocity profiles (Castagna et al., 1993). Vertical summations (Hardage, 1983) of the upgoing waves produce S-wave composite traces and enable interpretation of S-wave seismic profile sections. In the simplest application of amplitude anomalies, the coincidence of high amplitude P-wave reflectivity and low amplitude S-wave reflectivity is potentially a direct indicator of the presence of natural gas.