Confidence in data recorded with land seismic recorders

Abstract

Seismic contractors and their clients constantly strive to increase the productivity of land seismic acquisition projects, and this combined with a trend for denser receiver geometries is resulting in much larger volumes of data being acquired on a daily basis. This has created a challenge for the checking of data consistency and its suitability for imaging, and has led to new approaches to in-field quality control. In addition, land seismic recording equipment has been evolving, creating divergences in the way that different systems operate, and three categories of land systems have emerged that can be separately identified – cabled systems, wireless systems, and cross-technology systems. These different classes of systems have distinctive approaches to in-field quality control capabilities, associated with their philosophy and architecture – QC may be acquired in real time, it may be collected from the equipment in-field with some field crew effort, or indeed there may be no QC acquired at all. Some equipment manufacturers insist that with the greatly improved reliability of modern electronics, monitoring of QC during seismic acquisition is no longer of importance. However, for most seismic contractors and the great majority of their clients the reassurance provided by QC monitoring is an important aspect of the operations. In this paper, we firstly discuss how land recorders have evolved and the impact of QC, then describe the different categories of land systems focusing principally on their QC capabilities, and finally discuss the operations of QC during acquisition projects.