Abstract

The discovery of Digboi oil field in 1889 & series of oil seepages brought Nagafoot hills region into focus for its hydrocarbon potential in the past. Yet, a vast prognosticated resource of hydrocarbon remains unexplored due to complex geological set up and poor seismic response in thrust zones/ below thrusts. The characteristic rugged topography and complex subsurface geology poses significant physical and technical challenges in acquiring, processing and interpreting the datasets in the quest of hydrocarbon resources. Estimation of precise statics correction and velocity from the acquired dataset are key elements that dictate the quality of images that can be faithfully reconstructed. In areas compounded by such challenges, utility of travel time tomography for estimation of the near surface velocity model can be used as a supplementary aid to conventional processing approaches. The estimated velocity-depth model from travel time inversion of first beak arrival picks can be further converted in to rms velocity in time and used for deriving more accurate stacking velocity for further processing.