Advantages of DTW windowing function in automated correlation of stratigraphic time series

The Dynamical Time Warping (DTW) technique has been originally developed for speech recognition in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has more recently been applied in geoscientific studies. One of the key objectives of dtw is to stretch or compress two complementary series locally in order for one series to resemble the other as much as possible. In our project, we aim to correlate industrial and scientific downhole wireline logs from offshore Australia, with the ultimate goal to obtain a regional paleoclimate reconstruction at high spatial resolution (“All around Australia”). Here, we propose a novel way to constrain the alignment of two sedimentary sequences based on a-priori stratigraphic information. Therewith, we provide a means to make dtw calculations less computationally expensive, while still evaluating all possible stratigraphic correlations, even for long time-series.