Abstract

An automatic, non-artificially extended, fault surface based horizon modeling method and apparatus produces a final faulted horizon model which is a three dimensional representation of a faulted earth formation including all the horizons and all the faults in response to seismic data, well log data, and fault surfaces and relationships data. The horizon modeling apparatus produces the final faulted horizon model by filtering input horizon data and removing bad (wrong-sided) data points. This is accomplished by: (a) computing intersections between each horizon and each fault that intersects the horizon, (b) assessing the quality of each intersection, (c) filtering in the vicinity of the intersection by decreasing the slope between the intersecting fault and its respective horizon, (d) generating a horizon surface and reassessing their quality, (e) reintroducing the eliminated data points between the fault and the horizon, (f) re-filtering the reintroduced data points, (g) generating an initial faulted horizon model, (h) generating a set of final fault locations, and (i) generating a final faulted horizon model.