Field Test of the Point Receiver Land Acquisition Technology Performed in Timimoun, Algeria

An acquisition field test was performed in Algeria to assess the benefits of point receiver recording for enhancing the resolution and signal/noise ratio of land seismic surveys. Recording point receivers (or point sources) instead of the conventional receiver or source arrays enables pre-processing (such as intra-array static and amplitude corrections, surface noise attenuation) to be applied before Digital Group Forming (DGF). Point receivers were simulated by bunching at the same location the six geophones of each string and a dense strip of 4 lines of 6 km of "point receivers" was deployed with a fine sampling of 6.25 m X 6.25 m. These additional test lines were simultaneously recorded with the regular 3D receiver spread. Causing a minimal delay to the 3D operations, a point receiver 3D dataset of 2 km X 9 km was then recorded and compared to a 3D reference dataset of equivalent fold and geometry. Equivalent but independent processing sequences were applied to both datasets, except the above pre-processing applied to point receivers before DGF. The results are encouraging for the use of point receiver technology in improving signal/noise and bandwidth in this area.