ARTICLE

Analysis of seismic spectral attenuation based on Wigner-Ville distribution for sandstone reservoir characterization – a case study from West Sichuan Depression, China

XIOYANG WU TIANYOU LIU
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Institute of Geophysics and Geomatics, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, P.R.China,
JSE 2010, 19(1), 69–85;
Submitted: 9 June 2025 | Revised: 9 June 2025 | Accepted: 9 June 2025 | Published: 9 June 2025
© 2025 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

Wu, X. and Liu, T., 2010. Analysis of seismic spectral aitenuation based on Wigner-Ville distribution for sandstone reservoir characterization - a case study from the West Sichuan depression, China. Journal of Seismic Exploration, 19: 69-85. A mass of previous work has shown the application of seismic spectral decomposition for low frequency shadows detection and stratigraphic mapping. In this paper, we further analyze the characteristics of spectral attenuation in fractured sandstone reservoirs saturated with different fluids by Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) based method. We give a description on the geometric structure of cross-terms due to bilinear nature of WVD with a multicomponent signal composed of three Gaussian time-frequency atoms. Then cross-terms are eliminated using improved WVD with time and frequency independent Gaussian kernels as smoothing windows, what is called the smoothed pseudo WVD (SPWVD). At last the SPWVD is applied to spectral decomposition of seismic data from West Sichuan depression of China. We focus our study on the comparison of characteristics of spectral attenuation in order to verify whether SPWVD can differentiate different fluids content. It shows that prolific gas reservoirs show higher peak spectral amplitude at higher peak frequency, which attenuate faster than low quality gas reservoirs and dry or wet reservoirs. SPWVD is able to separate prolific gas reservoirs from low-quality gas reservoirs and dry or wet reservoirs. This can be regarded as a spectral attenuation signature for future exploration in the study area.

Keywords
Wigner-Ville distribution
Gaussian kernel function
spectral attenuation
fluids
fractured sandstone reservoir
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Electronic ISSN: 0963-0651 Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing