Repeatability issues of high-frequency signals emitted by air-gun arrays

Abstract

Recent field measurements of the acoustic signals generated by marine seismic air-gun arrays showed that the amount of high-frequency signals (above 10 kHz) increased with the size and total volume of the gun array. We found that for frequencies between 10 and 20 kHz, a strong signal is observed 7–14 ms after the main peak of the source signal. We believe that this signal was generated by ghost cavitation. We observed that this signal was significantly stronger than the high-frequency signal generated at the same time as the peak signal occurs within the bandwidth between 10 and 20 kHz. We found that this high-frequency signal was fairly repeatable from one shot to another. By “fairly,” we mean that individual high-frequency events were not repeatable; however, the envelope energy of this cascade of events was repeatable from one shot to another. The typical feature of the envelope of the high-frequency signal was that it lasted for approximately 6–7 ms and showed a monotonic increase in amplitude for the first 5–6 ms, followed by a sudden drop. The sea surface reflection coefficient for these high-frequency events seemed to decrease in magnitude as the frequency increased.