oa Broadband marine seismic, how much difference does acquisition and or processing make? A case study from Southeast Asia

This paper describes a field experiment designed to test various forms of marine broadband acquisition and their appropriate processing techniques. These methods are compared against a traditional “shallow tow” (8 m) cable depth and de-phasing processing flow. We take particular interest in a slanted cable acquisition technique and other ways of creating “notch diversity” with a marine streamer. We analyse the resultant data with displays, spectra and frequency split displays.

Overall the experiment shows that we can model the cable ghost response of the system well enough to understand the response of real data. This allows the application of deterministic inverse operators to not only “de-phase” and re-datum the data but also frequency shaping the output data closer to the spectrum of the input pulse. This is particularly important when the cable is slanted in an oblique manner relative to the sea surface. However, noise at frequency extremes will limit this process and other shaping methods. The final results show remarkably similar end results despite quite different acquisition methods.