Hunting High and Low in Marine Seismic Acquisition; Combining Wide-Tow Top Sources with Front Sources

Abstract

Summary Placing marine sources on the top of the seismic streamer spread improves resolution and reservoir inversion in shallow and intermediate depth targets. This is due to the abundance of near offset data and high illumination compared to conventional marine seismic. A drawback of this top source solution is the lack of long offsets, which are important for deeper imaging and AVO. In this paper, we present a combined solution with sources on both the top and in the front of the spread. We deploy the front sources from the streamer vessel, while a separate dedicated source vessel is towing the widely separated top sources on top of the spread. With successful deblending of the different sources, this solution could give an operationally efficient solution to the seismic imaging and inversion problem, for both shallow and deep targets, and providing both high and low frequencies. We will present the acquisition concept and describe the deblending strategy, to address the common challenge to any multiple-source blended acquisition.