Abstract
The Global Navigation Satellite System combined with acoustic technique has achieved great economic benefits in positioning of ocean bottom seismometers, with hundreds of underwater transponders attached to seismometers typically being deployed during oil exploration. The previous single transponder positioning method ignored the similar underwater environments between the transponders. Due to the refraction effect of sound, the technique usually showed poor positioning accuracy in shallow water when the incidence angles are large. In this paper, the effect of sound ray bending is analyzed based on the sound ray tracing method in shallow water, and a new piecewise incidence angle model is proposed to improve the positioning accuracy of multiple objects in order to estimate the sound ray bending correction. The parameters of the new model are divided into groups and estimated by sequential least squares method, together with all of the transponders. The observability analysis is discussed in simulation and testing experiments in the South China Sea. The results show that the newly proposed method is able to make full use of the acoustic observation data of hundreds of transponders to accurately estimate the SRB correction, which could also significantly improve the positioning accuracy of multiple transponders.
Highlights
During data acquisition using ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) in shallow water, it is usually necessary to locate a large number of submarine seismometers [1]
Unlike the other methods, the new method is able method can cancel the effect of sound ray bending (SRB) by estimating the sound speed, and the average positioning to calculate the vertical components with centimeter-level accuracy as well, and the average accuracy accuracy of transponders is higher than 10 cm in the horizontal direction
We find that the accuracy of the Epoch horizontal1536 and vertical components tends to decrease with the decrease in the sample rate300 under bad conditions
Summary
During data acquisition using ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) in shallow water, it is usually necessary to locate a large number of submarine seismometers [1]. Quite a few studies have measured and analyzed SSP with different techniques to reduce the errors caused by sound speed and sound ray bending (SRB) [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25] Previous methods, such as the epoch difference method [12] and the time model [15,17], are usually used under conditions with long observation times, where the SRB changes more significantly over time, and are not convenient during shallow water oil exploration.
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