3D OBS Survey Design – Estimating Lateral Resolution and Acquisition Footprint

P197 3D OBS SURVEY DESIGN: ESTIMATING LATERAL RESOLUTION AND ACQUISITION FOOTPRINT Summary 1 We present a method for the design of 3D ocean-bottom seismic (OBS) surveys that allows us to estimate lateral resolution as well as acquisition footprint as a function of the acquisition geometry. Our method is equivalent to forward modeling followed by migration but is much faster than a bruteforce application of modeling and migration. There are primarily three reasons why this is possible. First we restrict the method to laterally invariant velocity i.e. v(z). Second we compute the image only at one depth. Third it is sufficient