Illustrated Seismic Processing Volume 2: Preimaging, by Stephen J. Hill and Andreas Rueger, ISBN 978-1-560-80368-3, 2020, Society of Exploration Geophysicists, 330 p., $72 (print), $61 (e-book).

Last year, I had the pleasure of reviewing the first volume of this publication that covered imaging. At the risk of repeating myself, I commended the authors for the clarity and openness in their motivation and thoughtfulness of their design. The books are primarily aimed at new processors, acquisition specialists, and interpreters who wish to understand the limitations and pitfalls in the data they are analyzing. It was clear from the first volume that it had been well honed by decades of teaching and did a first-rate job of meeting its stated aims. In this second volume, the authors cover something that the book title refers to as “preimaging,” though most would normally call it “processing” or (even though it is somewhat of a tautology) “preprocessing.”

This volume opens with a chapter on filtering and coherence enhancement, in which the features of the series seen in the first volume are once again quickly evident. These include little, if any, mathematical detail; a lot of illustrations (many in color); and plenty of references to Yilmaz for further details. All of these work well. The only slight concern is that Yilmaz’s classic text is now 20 years old and does not encompass some of the new approaches commonly used in the processing world. This first chapter also includes an interesting section titled “Can there be too much data processing?” This is a topic worthy of more prominence and highlights a pleasing example showing how a series of coherent reflectors may be created in a seismic section that only truly contains incoherent noise by an eager and heavy-handed processing sequence. This reminds us that in the uncertain world of seismic, it is always sensible to stick by the principle of Occam’s razor and aim for as simple a processing sequence as possible.

Next up is the first chapter on multiples. Entire volumes have been written about multiple attenuation, and despite our advances in model building and migration technology, it is still often the case that the success of a seismic imaging project will stand and fall on the quality of the demultiple. Hence, it is appropriate that three chapters of this volume are dedicated to multiple attenuation (with a small section on the topic of imaging with multiples), although one of the chapters is oddly disconnected from the others in the running order. In fact, at times, the way the chapters are organized seems a little haphazard. To be fair, with the breadth of material that needs to be covered in a relatively short volume, there is always going to be room for debate in the way it is arranged. For example, a useful and interesting chapter on signal-to-noise improvements, replete with nice examples of the wealth of noise that seismic processors have to contend with (shrimp noise anyone?), is relegated to an appendix. To balance this gripe, I was delighted to see a chapter in the main body of the text on model resolution, which is a generally poorly understood topic that is often considered unimportant.

What is undoubtedly true is that together with the first volume in the set, the authors have put together a well-written, well-illustrated, and well-considered publication that should be top of the list for interpreters, acquisition specialists, and anyone wanting to understand the myriad of elements that make up a modern seismic imaging project. I hope these books are going to continue to be updated as the technology we utilize continues to develop. If that happens, they should become an indispensable part of the seismic practitioner’s bookshelf.

— John Brittan

Weybridge, UK