Chapter 1 - Introduction to Multishooting: Challenges and Rewards

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the challenges of decoding multishot data and the approaches that are used for addressing these challenges. The potential savings in time and money associated with multishooting are enormous, because the cost of simulating or acquiring numerous shots simultaneously is almost identical to the cost of simulating and acquiring one shot. The chapter discusses these potential savings for (1) seismic acquisition, (2) numerical simulation of seismic surveys, (3) seismic data processing, and (4) data storage. The multishooting acquisition consists of generating seismic waves from several positions simultaneously or at time intervals smaller than the duration of the seismic data. Simulating seismic surveys corresponds to solving the differential equations which control the wave propagation in the earth under a set of initial, final, and boundary conditions. The most successful numerical techniques for solving these differential equations include (1) finite-difference modeling (FDM) based on numerical approximations of derivatives, (2) ray-tracing methods, (3) reflectivity methods, and (4) scattering methods based on the Born or Kirchhoff approximations. The end products of seismic data acquisition and processing are images of the subsurface. When seismic data are acquired based on the concept of multishooting described earlier, there are two possible routes that can be taken to obtain the images of the subsurface.