A comparison of reflection coefficients in porous media from 2D plane-wave analysis & spectral element forward modeling

Abstract

The Biot theory provides a general framework for describing the seismic response of porous media. Proper boundary conditions must be specified for the following three cases: the elastic-poroelastic interface, the acoustic-poroelastic interface and the poroelastic-poroelastic interface for accurate modeling and inversion of seismic data. In this study, we first review the expressions for reflection coefficients for all three cases from plane-wave analysis. We subsequently benchmark the first two cases against spectral element method (SEM) forward modeling to verify and ensure consistency between finite-frequency wavelets. We show with numerical examples, that both methods lead to comparable results within frequency range between 5Hz and 80Hz, which is of relevance to exploration seismology.