Accurate Multiple Ocean Bottom Seismometer Positioning in Shallow Water Using GNSS/Acoustic Technique

Abstract

The Global Navigation Satellite System combined with acoustic technique has achieved great economic benefits in positioning of ocean bottom seismometers, with hundreds of underwater transponders attached to seismometers typically being deployed during oil exploration. The previous single transponder positioning method ignored the similar underwater environments between the transponders. Due to the refraction effect of sound, the technique usually showed poor positioning accuracy in shallow water when the incidence angles are large. In this paper, the effect of sound ray bending is analyzed based on the sound ray tracing method in shallow water, and a new piecewise incidence angle model is proposed to improve the positioning accuracy of multiple objects in order to estimate the sound ray bending correction. The parameters of the new model are divided into groups and estimated by sequential least squares method, together with all of the transponders. The observability analysis is discussed in simulation and testing experiments in the South China Sea. The results show that the newly proposed method is able to make full use of the acoustic observation data of hundreds of transponders to accurately estimate the SRB correction, which could also significantly improve the positioning accuracy of multiple transponders.

Geodetic Seafloor Positioning Using an Unmanned Surface Vehicle—Contribution of Direction-of-Arrival Observations

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Adaptive Robust Unscented Kalman Filter for AUV Acoustic Navigation

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“…Offshore engineering and environmental studies require precise knowledge of the lithological properties of shallow marine sediments. Multi-channel seismic profiling or, even better, using ocean-bottom cables [1] can provide high-resolution images over wide areas [2,3]; however, the associated costs can only be borne for large-scale projects such as the construction of platforms for oil and gas exploration [4] or large wind farms [5][6][7][8]. For smaller engineering projects in high-traffic areas such as harbors [9], archeological areas [10] or sensitive environments [11][12][13], the low cost and ease of use of Boomer surveys may be the only viable option [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”