TRAVEL Fund Request for Invited Speakers and Junior Scientists to attend seismic imaging conference in Hainan, China

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This is workshop travel support for 14 junior scientists (mostly graduate students, with a few postdoctoral researchers) from the USA to travel to Sanya, Hainan China for the Symposium in geophysical imaging. The NSF of China has some co-funding to support the local accommodations for the invited speakers, and for the registrations and other conference expenses. IASPEI (International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth?s Interior), SEG (Society of Exploration Geophysicists) and EAGE (European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers) have endorsed and listed the Symposium as their formal symposium or workshop. Geophysical imaging is the key for subsurface structural delineation, target detection and property inversion. It has a wide range of applications to subsurface resources exploration, crust and mantle structures, earthquake rapture process and fault structure, and shallow target detection. Due to the increasingly high complexity of the geological environments for oil/gas exploration and other imaging targets, such as for monitoring CO2 sequestration and pollution control, and the explosively increased data amount collected by the new acquisition system, highresolution, high-fidelity and high-efficiency imaging methods are highly in demanding. For highresolution, high-fidelity imaging, we need much more phase-space information, such as the main direction of the local energy flux, instant frequency of the wavefield, rather than a straightforward space-domain solution. In other words, we need accurate and efficient propagators with phasespace localizations. Such phase-space information is crucial in modern true-amplitude, truereflection imaging and parameter inversion. With phase-space localized wave propagators, local AVA (amplitude variation with angle), local inversion for reservoir parameters can be performed and the close link between imaging and inversion can be established. Recently emerged seismic imaging methods using fast beam, fast wavepacket and other localized waves, such as beamlet, curvelet, have brought up broad interests in the study of imaging using localized waves. The relevant researches have been spread to many branches of physics, acoustics, seismology, engineering and mathematics.The symposium is different from other geophysical conferences and workshops in its broad scope and interdisciplinary interactions. The intensive invited speeches serves as introductory lectures by the experts of different fields.