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Seismic survey process is the common method of prospecting and exploration of deposits: oil and natural gas. Invented at the beginning of the XX century, it has received significant development and is currently used by almost all service oil companies. Its main advantages are the acceptable cost of fieldwork (in comparison with drilling wells) and the accuracy of estimating the characteristics of the subsurface area. However, with the discovery of non-traditional deposits (for example, the Arctic shelf, the Bazhenov Formation), the task of improving existing and creating new seismic data processing technologies became important. Significant development in this direction is possible with the use of numerical simulation of the propagation of seismic waves in realistic models of the geological medium, since it is possible to specify an arbitrary internal structure of the medium with subsequent evaluation of the synthetic signal-response.

The present work is devoted to the study of spatial dynamic processes occurring in geological medium containing fractured inclusions in the process of seismic exploration. The authors constructed a three-dimensional model of a layered massif containing a layer of fluid-saturated cracks, which makes it possible to estimate the signal-response when the structure of the inhomogeneous inclusion is varied. To describe physical processes, we use a system of equations for a linearly elastic body in partial derivatives of the second order, which is solved numerically by a grid-characteristic method on hexahedral grid. In this case, the crack planes are identified at the stage of constructing the grid, and further an additional correction is used to ensure a correct seismic response for the model parameters typical for geological media.

In the paper, three-component area seismograms with a common explosion point were obtained. On their basis, the effect of the structure of a fractured medium on the anisotropy of the seismic response recorded on the day surface at a different distance from the source was estimated. It is established that the kinematic characteristics of the signal remain constant, while the dynamic characteristics for ordered and disordered models can differ by tens of percents.

In this paper we present Rayleigh formulas obtained from Kirchhoff integral formulas, which can later be used to obtain migration images. The relevance of the studies conducted in the work is due to the widespread use of migration in the interests of seismic oil and gas seismic exploration. A special feature of the work is the use of an elastic approximation to describe the dynamic behaviour of a geological environment, in contrast to the widespread acoustic approximation. The proposed approach will significantly improve the quality of seismic exploration in complex cases, such as permafrost and shelf zones of the southern and northern seas. The complexity of applying a system of equations describing the state of a linear-elastic medium to obtain Rayleigh formulas and algorithms based on them is a significant increase in the number of computations, the mathematical and analytical complexity of the resulting algorithms in comparison with the case of an acoustic medium. Therefore in industrial seismic surveys migration algorithms for the case of elastic waves are not currently used, which creates certain difficulties, since the acoustic approximation describes only longitudinal seismic waves in geological environments. This article presents the final analytical expressions that can be used to develop software systems using the description of elastic seismic waves: longitudinal and transverse, thereby covering the entire range of seismic waves: longitudinal reflected PP-waves, longitudinal reflected SP-waves, transverse reflected PS-waves and transverse reflected SS-waves. Also, the results of comparison of numerical solutions obtained on the basis of Rayleigh formulas with numerical solutions obtained by the grid-characteristic method are presented. The value of this comparison is due to the fact that the method based on Rayleigh integrals is based on analytical expressions, while the grid-characteristic method is a method of numerical integration of solutions based on a calculated grid. In the comparison, different types of sources were considered: a point source model widely used in marine and terrestrial seismic surveying and a flat wave model, which is also sometimes used in field studies.

This paper considers the inverse problem of seismic exploration — determining the structure of the media based on the recorded wave response from it. Large cracks are considered as target objects, whose size and position are to be determined.

he direct problem is solved using the grid-characteristic method. The method allows using physically based algorithms for calculating outer boundaries of the region and contact boundaries inside the region. The crack is assumed to be thin, a special condition on the crack borders is used to describe the crack.

The inverse problem is solved using convolutional neural networks. The input data of the neural network are seismograms interpreted as images. The output data are masks describing the medium on a structured grid. Each element of such a grid belongs to one of two classes — either an element of a continuous geological massif, or an element through which a crack passes. This approach allows us to consider a medium with an unknown number of cracks.

The neural network is trained using only samples with one crack. The final testing of the trained network is performed using additional samples with several cracks. These samples are not involved in the training process. The purpose of testing under such conditions is to verify that the trained network has sufficient generality, recognizes signs of a crack in the signal, and does not suffer from overtraining on samples with a single crack in the media.

The paper shows that a convolutional network trained on samples with a single crack can be used to process data with multiple cracks. The networks detects fairly small cracks at great depths if they are sufficiently spatially separated from each other. In this case their wave responses are clearly distinguishable on the seismogram and can be interpreted by the neural network. If the cracks are close to each other, artifacts and interpretation errors may occur. This is due to the fact that on the seismogram the wave responses of close cracks merge. This cause the network to interpret several cracks located nearby as one. It should be noted that a similar error would most likely be made by a human during manual interpretation of the data. The paper provides examples of some such artifacts, distortions and recognition errors.