Research on combined processing techniques of air gun and sparker source towed streamer seismic data

• Published in: Marine geophysical researches 2022-06, Vol.43 (2), Article 18
• Main Authors: Yang, Zhu, Wang, Xiangchun, Hao, Xiaozhu, Qian, Hongfei, Chen, Xuelei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Air guns; Amplitude; Corrections; Data analysis; Data processing; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Geology; Geophysics/Geodesy; High frequency; Noise; Oceanography; Offshore Engineering; Original Research Paper; Resolution; Seismic activity; Seismic data; Seismic exploration; Seismic surveys; Seismological data; Surveys; Velocity
• ISSN: 0025-3235; 1573-0581
• DOI: 10.1007/s11001-022-09484-y

In recent years, sparker source has gradually been applied for high-resolution seismic surveys. But the air gun is still the most commonly used seismic sources in marine seismic exploration. The seismic data frequency range of the air gun sources is below 200 Hz. On the contrary, the seismic data frequency range of the sparker sources is about 50–500 Hz. The low and high frequency components of the seismic data are both important for high resolution seismic exploration. Usually the energy produced by the air gun sources is stronger than that of the sparker sources, so the exploration depth of the air gun sources is bigger than that of the sparker sources. How to make full use of the two kinds of source to carry out high-resolution seismic exploration is a particularly meaningful work. Here the combined processing idea of the two kinds of sources’ towed streamer seismic data were presented and we designed a complete data processing workflow. The amplitude matching of air gun and sparker source seismic data is a very key technique in this combined processing. The main processing steps include conventional processing such as noise attenuation, amplitude compensation, wavelet processing, velocity analysis, pre-stack time migration and so on. But also, there are some special processing techniques such as the residual static corrections, CDP trim statics corrections and post-stack predictive deconvolution which are applied to the sparker source data. The results show that the migration section of the combined processing is better than those of the separately processing.