The Impact of ISS(R) Blending on Amplitude Fidelity for AVO Analysis

The ISS® and ISSN™ techniques are high efficiency simultaneous source acquisition technologies. The high productivity of these techniques allows for the acquisition of high fold, wide azimuth datasets. The improvement in the quality of the stack image achieved with high fold, wide azimuth acquisition design has been well documented. However in order to evaluate the impact on pre stack data quality from blending data with the ISS and ISSN acquisition techniques, a study has been conducted using a non simultaneous source dataset acquired with the same high fold and wide azimuth geometry as an ISSN dataset. In this paper we review the acquisition of the control dataset, during a Libya ISSN survey. The artificial blending of the dataset to create different models of the ISSN acquisition, each with varying numbers of active sources and source separations is described. The processing of the ISSN models and control dataset and the subsequent AVO and pre stack amplitude analysis of the datasets are presented. We show that for the level of blending noise (2 to 3 simultaneous source events per record) typically encountered with BP ISS and ISSN surveys the results of the AVO analysis are consistent with the control dataset.