Ocean Bottom Seismic Acquisition via Jittered Sampling

We present a pragmatic marine acquisition scheme where multiple source vessels sail across an ocean-bottom array firing airguns at—jittered source locations and instances in time. Following the principles of compressive sensing, we can significantly impact the reconstruction quality of conventional seismic data (from jittered data) and demonstrate successful recovery by sparsity promotion. In contrast to random (under)sampling, acquisition via jittered (under)sampling helps in controlling the maximum gap size, which is a practical requirement of wavefield reconstruction with localized sparsifying transforms. Results are illustrated with simulations of time-jittered marine acquisition, which translates to jittered source locations for a given speed of the source vessel, for two source vessels.