An Effective Algorithm for Tri-phone Reorientation

For multi-components data processing, a critical initial stage is the determination of the orientation of the geophones in the field. A number of solutions have been proposed to achieve this goal, some of them are based on the first break window, others use instead the reflected and converted energy part of the records. In this paper we propose a very simple modeling of the recorded first breaks that allows the estimation of the tri-phone orientation as a 3D rotation matrix. Issues such as vector fidelity or instrument coupling are not considered here. The result of the algorithm is demonstrated using real data.