Spatial Sampling and Multiple Suppression Properties of Wide-azimuth Towed Streamer Acquisition Geometries

Wide azimuth towed streamer (WATS) surveys are gaining popularity and seem to result in a significantly better image quality than more conventional marine acquisition geometries. However, it still is not completely understood which properties of wide-azimuth acquisition cause the improvements. We examine WATS using conventional spatial sampling theory (Hampson, 1998) along with 2.5-D synthetic experiments. This shows (a) significant weaknesses in the offset sampling, and (b) how the variation of the multiple’s Green’s function with azimuth is a strong factor in multiple suppression. We quantitatively compare the multiple suppression performance of several towed streamer geometries. This illustrates the trade-off between larger cross-line offset and cross-line sampling.