Air‐gun source instabilities

Abstract

The signature of an air‐gun array can change over a period of time or even from one shot to the next. If the signature variations are large, then deterministic deconvolution, with an operator designed from a single signature or from an average signature, could produce errors significant enough to affect data interpretation. Possible sources of air‐gun instability include changes in gun positions, firing times, and pressures, gun failures, and scattering from the fluctuating rough ocean surface. If an air‐gun array were perfectly stable, after application of signature deconvolution the residual signatures for a sequence of shots would be identically shaped, broadband, zero‐phase wavelets. In practice, air‐gun instabilities lead to two major defects in band‐ limited residual signatures: the central portion of the wavelet can become asymmetrical, and unsuppressed energy can occur in the residual bubble region. Processing experiments done with synthesized air‐gun array signatures show that of all types of air‐gun instabilities likely to occur, only gun dropouts cause signature variations severe enough to affect data interpretation. Gun dropouts produce unsuppressed residual bubble energy that can show up as phantom events on a stacked section or that can obscure small‐amplitude events following large‐amplitude events. Neither gun dropouts nor any other kind of air‐gun instability has a significant effect on resolution within the seismic band. Since gun dropouts do not happen on a shot‐to‐shot basis and other instabilities are unimportant, there is no practical benefit to be gained by deriving and applying individual signature deconvolution operators for each shot. The influence of gun dropouts can be minimized through other actions taken in acquisition and processing.