Blended acquisition with dispersed source arrays

Abstract

Blended source arrays are historically configured with equal source units, such as broadband vibrators (land) and broadband air-gun arrays (marine). I refer to this concept as homogeneous blending. I have proposed to extend the blending concept to inhomogeneous blending, meaning that a blended source array consists of different source units. More specifically, I proposed to replace in blended acquisition the traditional broadband sources by narrowband versions — imagine coded single air guns with different volumes or coded single narrowband vibrators with different central frequencies — together representing a dispersed source array (DSA). Similar to what we see in today’s audio systems, the DSA concept allows the design of dedicated narrowband source elements that do not suffer from the low versus high frequency compromise. In addition, the DSA concept opens the possibility to use source depths and spatial sampling intervals that are optimum for the low-, mid-, and high-frequency sources (multiscale shooting grids). DSAs are considered to be an important step in robotizing the seismic acquisition process.