Beyond WAZ - A Modeling-based Evaluation of Extensions to Current Wide Azimuth Streamer Acquisition Geometries

We modeled three enhancements to the typical wide-azimuth streamer (WAZ) acquisition, evaluating sub-salt illumination, angle coverage, and velocity error tolerance. The enhancements studied are overlapping orthogonal WAZ datasets, doubly wide WAZ, and very long offset WAZ. We find that, for the salt model and target structures studied, the long offset extension brings the most apparent uplift in all of the three aspects evaluated, and especially in the aspect of angle coverage sub-salt.