A geophone subarray beam-steering process

The outputs of geophone array elements are conventionally summed into a single output trace. This summation attenuates incoherent noise, horizontally propagating surface waves, and obliquely incident events. The geophone subarray beam-steering process is a plane-wave stacking technique which removes the differential moveout and improves the resolution of seismic data by directing the subarray peak gain to the incident angle of the seismic wavefront. The plane-wave stacking process transforms the data from the offset domain to the ray parameter (p) domain, and restricts the range of p as a function of time. Studies of synthetic and marine field data show that the beam-steering process improves the signal-to-noise ratio of obliquely incident events as compared to conventional subarray summing operations. The beam-steering process, compressing high-density data while preserving the high-frequency content of the seismic signal, is a cost-effective technique to process large quantities of closely spaced seismic data for stratigraphic exploration.