Abstract: The Visualization of Spatial Uncertainty

R. Mohan Srivastava

Geostatistical conditions simulation is gaining acceptance as a numerical modeling tool is the petroleum industry. Unfortunately, many of the new users of conditional simulation work with only one outcome or "realization" and ignore the many other outcomes that could be produced by their conditional simulation tools. 3D visualization tools allow them to create very realistic images of this single outcome as reality. There are many methods currently available for presenting the uncertainty information from a family of possible outcomes; most of these, however, use static displays and many of them present uncertainty in a format that is not intuitive. This paper explores the visualization of uncertainty through dynamic displays that exploit the intuitive link between uncertainty and cha ge by presenting the user with a constantly evolving model. The key technical challenge to such a dynamic presentation is the ability to create numerical models that honour the available well data and geophysical information and yet are incrementally different so that successive frames can be viewed rapidly as an animated cartoon. An example of volumetric uncertainty from a Gulf Coast reservoir will be used to demonstrate that such animation is possible and to show that such dynamic displays can be an effective tool in risk analysis for the petroleum industry.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90986©1994 AAPG Annual Convention, Denver, Colorado, June 12-15, 1994