Improving reservoir state prediction in digital shadows using Radon-transformed subsurface common-offset gathers

Digital shadows for subsurface monitoring use simulation-based inference to map seismic and well-log observations to evolving reservoir states such as CO 2 saturation and pressure. When the simulation forward models rely on simplified or misspecified rock physics, predictions become biased and uncertainty quantification degrades. We address this by combining rock-physics-aware amortized Bayesian inference with inference in the Radon domain of common-image gathers (CIGs). Angle-dependent information from Radon-transformed subsurface offset gathers improves separation of fluid and stress effects: fluids exhibit distinct amplitude-variation-with-angle (AVA) signatures, so conditioning the digital shadow on angle gathers yields more accurate and physically consistent joint estimates of saturation and pressure than conditioning on migrated stacks or offset-domain gathers. We train a context-aware amortized posterior estimator that conditions on seismic data and rock-physics context, enabling robustness to model misspecification and structured what-if analysis at inference time without retraining. On a synthetic 2D geological carbon storage scenario, conditioning on Radon-transformed CIGs improves joint saturation and pressure prediction relative to reverse-time migrated images, while context conditioning preserves interpretability and calibration under rock physics uncertainty.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Submitted/2026/gahlot2026IMA...