Free Software for Seismic Quality Control

A few weeks ago I saw a few posts on linkedin featuring the authors “top ten” windows based software for geoscience based tasks. Unfortunately I can’t find a link to these posts, maybe someone can help me out so I can link to them ?

In this series I wanted to make some notes on a topic that I’m asked about a lot namely “How do I view and QC seismic data for free ?”.

A normal starting point is the Wikipedia page Comparison of Free Geophysics Software. This list here from Ivan V. Dmitriev also contains some additional links to Matlab routines and navigation software.

I also have a slide in my online (and free !) seismic processing course which I am aiming to improve during this series of posts. The slide is attached to this post but note that none of the links will currently work since it’s just an image.

I should note up front that since I’ve been using Seismic Unix for many years I am rather biased in its favour and will likely recommend that it is the best software for many simple seismic processing and visualisation tasks. See my blog post here for how to duplicate my seismic unix install which is to use seismic unix under the windows linux subsystem (WSL). I’m happy to use the free packages for QC and verification. Infact they are often better for this than commercial packages for 2D. Only basic 3D processing/visualisation is available in freeware. I use commercial packages for production processing, linking gathers to stack sections, interactive processing etc. I’d be a bit uneasy doing anything fully commercial using freeware unless I had independently compared results with something commercial.

So future posts will inform readers on:

• Tricks and scripts for the autogeneration of images for inclusion and comparison within powerpoint (in prep).
• Preparing a post featuring installation and comparisons of the various GUI available for seismic unix such as botoseis or OpenSeaSeis . The latter post can be found here.
  • Tools generally lacking in freeware are:
    • Velocity analysis/velocity model building tools
    • Anisotropy derivation tools
    • Interactive testing/parameter verification tools
    • Multi-threaded Applications (but again if doing 2D or shot by shot processing its easy to do this in scripts).
    • SRME
    • Statics derivation/geometry handling.
    • 3D denoise (or 3D processing in general other than some free 3D modelling and imaging codes out there).

• Comparisons and reviews of Windows based QC software such as g-viewer and SeiSee. This is my SeiSee review and here is a review of the recently released SeisTopia and Geo2View seismic data viewers.
• Here is an overview of OpenSeaSeis – its installation and type of things that it may be useful for.
• Incomplete wishlist of things that could be included in a free seismic viewer to make it more useful:
  1. Image comparison tools such as difference/wipe/flip (trivial to do, but not present in ?any? free viewers).
  2. Overlay tools e.g. seismic and velocity model
• One of my contacts referred me to SPAC-RT for QC of seismic noise in passive seismic methods.
• Notes on commercially available seismic processing software
• Anything anyone else thinks would be interesting or useful – please make comments !!