Seismic data conversion

Convert different Seismic data file formats by using the IBM® Open Data for Industries Seismic DDMS APIs and utilities.

Important: The IBM Open Data for Industries data format conversion processes use industry standard solutions that are provided by third-party vendors. These solutions are in the form of external libraries. Their containerized workflow logic is developed as part of the IBM Open Data for Industries data platform. The details of the third-party solutions are out of scope of the current document.

Seismic Data Formats

The oil and gas industry needs convenient ways to manage the seismic data by storing it, organizing it, and accessing geophysical, geological, and other subsurface data.

Geophysical data is collected and recorded in various ways. The industry uses various media and multiple formats in both physical and digital storage locations.

Often, the industry needs to analyze legacy seismic data. The reprocessing or further interpretation require converting the data into new media formats.

Thus, various ways of managing the data exist that depend on the various data formats and the features associated with these formats.

The bodies of the domain experts define the seismic data formats. Regardless of the variety of the data formats used, the following seismic data formats are widely accepted between the stakeholders in oil and gas industry:
SEGY or SGY

The SEGY (also written as SGY) file format is an open standard, developed by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) for storing geophysical data.

SEGY is the most basic format to store seismic data.
ZGY
ZGY is a file format that is used for storing 3D seismic trace data. Data is commonly converted to ZGY from SEGY format. The ZGY format also supports compression of data.
ZGY uses "bricking" to store multiple resolutions of a data set. A brick typically consists of 64x64x64 samples, though brick sizes can vary.
ZGY is a compressed format of the SEGY data. The ZGY format requires less storage space and it is easily exchangeable.
Open - Volume Data Store
Open VDS is an open source reference implementation of the VDS storage format. It is used for fast random access to multi-dimensional (up to 6D) volumetric data. The volumetric data is stored in an object storage cloud service.
Open VDS uses a highly compressed form of the seismic data and can even hold data volumes of petabyte size.

The data formats structure large volumes of geophysical measurements and relates them together to 2D or 3D-model representations.

The IBM Open Data for Industries oil and gas data platform can easily change from one data format to another.

One of the advantages of such data management feature is that the compressed form of the geophysical data can be easily exchanged between various applications.

IBM Open Data for Industries Seismic format conversion capability

Converted format Convert to DAG definition Description Third-party vendor
SEGY ZGY DAG definitions that use the Kubernetes Pod Operators. The conversion logic runs on demand and is managed on the Apache Airflow workflow management platform. The docker image of the processing logic is provided by Schlumberger.
SEGY Open VDS DAG definitions that use the Kubernetes Pod Operators. The conversion logic runs on demand and is managed on the Apache Airflow workflow management platform. The docker image of the processing logic is provided by Bluware Inc.

Details on the available conversion processes are found in: