Benefits of Blended Acquisition with Dispersed Source Arrays (DSA)

In blended data acquisition, the recorded wave field is incoherent. Nevertheless blended source units in the arrays are historically chosen to be equal. We propose to abandon this constraint. This allows us to suggest the exploitation of inhomogeneous blended sources, together representing a Dispersed Source Array (DSA). Each source unit involved in the survey might be dedicated to a narrow and arbitrary frequency bandwidth, without the need to satisfy the wideband requirement. Inhomogeneous blending with DSA has several attractive potential advantages. The design of such sources is potentially simpler. In addition, the DSA concept opens the possibility to use tow depths and spatial sampling intervals that are optimum for specific sources. The whole inhomogeneous ensemble of sources incorporated to the array is designed to cover the entire seismic bandwidth of interest.