A new seismic methodology to significantly improve deeper data character and interpretability on the North West Shelf

Abstract

The sea-surface reflection generates interferences between up- and down-going waves that ultimately limit the bandwidth of marine seismic data. This phenomenon known as ghosting actually occurs twice—on the source side and on the receiver side. Ghost attenuation or elimination to increase the signal bandwidth has been the focus of extensive research. The receiver ghost can be removed using dual-sensor ocean-bottom devices (Barr and Sanders, 1989), a dual-sensor towed streamer (Carlson et al, 2007) or an over/under streamer acquisition (Brink and Svendsen, 1987). The over/under technique can also be used to remove the source ghost (Moldoveanu, 2000) but it requires flip-flop shooting of two sources at two different depths, ultimately halving the survey shot-point density. Alternatively, the source ghost can be attenuated using a beam steering technique originally developed some 60 years ago for dynamite land acquisition (Shock, 1950). The principle is to detonate charges at various depths in a sequence that constructively builds the down-going wave at the expense of the up-going wave. This way the energy of the ghost (the surface-reflected up-going wave) is reduced compared to that of the primary pulse. In this paper we adapt the beam steering approach to airgun arrays in the marine environment.