An In-House Geophysical Software Product: FBQC (First Break Quality Control)

Software development has various advantages for our business. It differentiates us by tailoring a unique solution that gives us a massive advantage in the highly competitive market. The licensing costs of specialized off-the-shelf packages can sometimes be more than the support and maintenance costs of our custom solution. It provides the ability to respond to changing business needs of our clients much faster than with an off-the-shelf package by providing constant updates and maintenance.

Developing software for our geophysical projects has been the core focus of efforts in the Geophysical Research and Development Center since its establishment in 2009.

FBQC (First Break Quality Control) is one of our most successful software development projects which the idea has been raised by Processing Department and developed by Geophysical Research and Development Center. The collaborative approach across technical departments of our company fosters creative thinking that delivers results. Now after several revisions and polishing based on the findings and reports, we ensure that no nuance or subtlety is overlooked.

Near surface low velocity anomalies have a significant role in degrading and damaging the quality of the processing land seismic data. In order to minimize such effects, a step can be added to the processing sequence, which is, solving static anomalies with refraction method. For implementing this step, we need to pick the first break of traces. The first break picking is a very delicate and precise issue. The already established mathematical algorithms and automatic tools that are available in existing software products still have significant error, thus the results must be revised manually by a geophysicist. For 2D data-sets this revision can be done without taking much time and effort, but in case of 3D data this amount of time could be many person-months, requiring considerable human resources. Therefore, this step significantly affects the required time needed for processing projects. Practically first break picking is usually the most time consuming stage of seismic data processing. This pioneer and unique software by utilizing various diagrams and other controlling and mathematical tools helps the geophysicist to automatically or semi-automatically correct the first break timing errors with only a fraction of time.

FBQC is a software application, designed for manual or automatic editing and manipulating the first break times, picked by ProMAX and Claritas software solutions. It provides a relatively efficient and easy-to-use environment which can shorten the time consuming and arduous process of first break picking correction which has been accomplished automatically in other commercial software solutions.

This software along with providing an overview of the overall quality of the first break times in various regions, leads to processing acceleration and higher quality results by its precise and flawless functionality. As it has been observed, turnaround time of 3D processing projects have been reduced by 10% and the quality of statics corrections is improved. Some left-out geometrical errors can be detected in the projects as well.

Seismic Data Processing Center and Geophysical R&D Center