Introduction to this special section: Offshore and onshore broadband seismology

Abstract

Broadband acquisition has revolutionized the ability to image and resolve significantly more detailed geology and accurately extract seismic petrophysical properties in both a temporal and spatial sense, through improved resolution and detectability, and processes such as full-waveform inversion. One might have thought that this new paradigm for spectral broadening had been achieved with innovation such as nonlinear preemphasized sweeps and denoising of decreasingly shallow tow cables with high-density receivers. However, these technologies focused on the highest spectral bands in order to mitigate the impact of the earth's attenuation or interference from near-surface noise. Consequently, the lowest to midrange bands were not considered and suffered at the expense of boosting high frequencies with an overly optimistic expectation of enhancing the band-limited signal/noise ratio (Figure 1).