Short Class - Bandwith Limitations in Seismic Acquisition, Processing and Interpretation

Over the last few years we observed an increasing interest in improving the frequency content of seismic data. Although technological proposals to improve the bandwidth of seismic data ca be found as far as the middle of last century (Van Melle and Weatherburn, 1953; Haggerty, 1956; Ray, 1982; Berni, 1984), the “Low-frequency seismic” special section in the January 2007 issue of The Leading Edge may be a good milestone for a major technological shift towards broadband data. While most of the works presented at this EAGE-SBGf workshop on “Broadband Seismic” focuses on the effects of the source and receiver ghosts in the bandwidth of seismic data, there are many other important geophysical causes for the degradation of the seismic signal. This short class will first address some of the main causes for bandwidth limitations and how they affect the seismic signal. Next, some of the recently developed solutions, both in data acquisition and processing, will be described and analyzed. The final section discusses the implications that broader frequency content in the data brings to interpretation, inversion and reservoir characterization.