Abstract
3D realistic sea surface imaging from 3D dual-sensor towed streamer data is presented. The technique is based on separating data acquired by collocated dual-sensors into up-going and down-going wavefields. Subsequently, these wavefields are extrapolated upwards in order to image the sea surface. This approach has previously been demonstrated using 2D data examples. Here, the focus is on 3D data. Controlled 3D data based on the Kirchhoff-Helmholtz algorithm is generated, and the 3D sea surface imaging technique is applied. For coarsely spaced streamers from 3D field data, the technique is applied streamerwise (i.e., 2D wavefield separation, extrapolation, and imaging). In the latter case, the resulting sea surface profiles corresponding to each time frame are interpolated to demonstrate that the main sea surface characteristics are preserved, and artefacts due to 2D processing of 3D data are mainly limited to areas corresponding to large angles of incidence. Time-varying sea surfaces from two different 3D field data are imaged. The data examples were acquired under different weather conditions. The imaged sea surfaces show realistic wave heights, and their spectra suggest plausible speeds and directions.
Highlights
In marine seismic acquisition, rough sea surfaces cause amplitude and phase perturbations in the acquired seismic data [1]
The acquired data may not be ideal for correcting sea surface distortion of marine seismic data
Our interest is to further validate the sea surface imaging technology proposed by [3,4,5] which is applicable to field data
Summary
Rough sea surfaces cause amplitude and phase perturbations in the acquired seismic data [1]. In addition to the timevarying nature of the sea surface, seismic streamer depth may vary with time. Laws and Kragh [3] propose that specialized deconvolution methods can be used to remove such distortions if timevarying sea surface elevation measurements are available They derive sea surface elevations and vertical streamer displacements from time-varying pressure measurements using a specialized hydrophone setup. This method is dependent on the precision of the pressure sensors at very low frequencies (between 0.05 Hz and 0.3 Hz), which is well below normal seismic bandwidth. The feasibility of imaging 3D time-varying sea surfaces from 3D dual-sensor streamer data is demonstrated
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