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Geostatistical Inversion of Seismic Oceanography Data for Ocean Salinity and Temperature Models

Mathematical Geosciences volume 50, pages 477–489 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

Conventional multi-channel seismic reflection data, known as seismic oceanography, has recently been used for the qualitative interpretation of meso- to large-scale hydrographic structures of interest. Seismic oceanography has been successfully imaging oceanographic structures in an intermediate scale not sampled by traditional oceanographic tools, such as conductivity, depth and temperature measurements and eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data. However, few attempts have been made for successfully quantifying ocean properties, such as ocean temperature and salinity, directly from the seismic reflection data. This work presents an iterative geostatistical methodology capable of inverting conventional seismic oceanographic data simultaneously for high-resolution temperature and salinity ocean models. The proposed methodology was developed and implemented in a real set of contemporaneous XBT data and two-dimensional seismic profile acquired southwest of Portugal. The resulting high-resolution temperature and salinity models reproduce existing XBT data not used to constrain the geostatistical inversion, which permits reliable quantification of the ocean properties of interest.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank CERENA and CESAM for supporting this work and D. Klaeschen and R. Hobbs from the GO project for making available the processed line GO-LR-12 used in this study. The authors also acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CERENA, DECivil, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon University, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal

    Leonardo Azevedo, Rúben Nunes & Amílcar Soares

  2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, People’s Republic of China

    Xinghui Huang

  3. Departamento de Geociências and CESAM, Universidade de Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal

    Luís M. Pinheiro

  4. Partex Oil and Gas, Rua Ivone Silva, 6 - 1°, 1050-124, Lisbon, Portugal

    Maria Helena Caeiro

  5. Geophysical Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, People’s Republic of China

    Haibin Song

Authors
  1. Leonardo Azevedo
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  2. Xinghui Huang
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  3. Luís M. Pinheiro
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  4. Rúben Nunes
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  5. Maria Helena Caeiro
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  6. Haibin Song
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  7. Amílcar Soares
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Correspondence to Leonardo Azevedo.

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Azevedo, L., Huang, X., Pinheiro, L.M. et al. Geostatistical Inversion of Seismic Oceanography Data for Ocean Salinity and Temperature Models. Math Geosci 50, 477–489 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11004-017-9722-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11004-017-9722-x

Keywords

  • Seismic oceanography
  • Geostatistical inversion
  • Ocean properties