Land 3D: Groups or single sensors? Cables or radio? Geophysical and operational considerations

Abstract

Is the future of land acquisition systems in single sensors or groups? Cable, radio or no data telemetry (ie autonomous node) systems? Single or multi-component? Single sensors provide better signal than geophone groups; improved resolution and improved multi-component data. However, the increased noise with single sensors must be compensated with increased data density and more sophisticated data processing, and getting the value from shear waves seems more difficult than acquiring multicomponent data. The potential operational advantage of systems without cables is in areas with limited access or if the receiver station interval is large. Cable based systems have operational advantages where cables can be deployed, receiver station intervals are small and the geophysical advantage of improved field QC.

Evaluation of 3C microelectromechanical system data on a 2D line: Direct comparison with conventional vertical-component geophone arrays and PS-wave analysis

“…Nevertheless the use of MEMS-based digital sensors has been promoted by several workers during the last few years (Tessman et al, 2001;Mougenot, 2004;Mougenot and Thorburn, 2004), and some field examples of different MEMS-based systems in comparison with conventional geophones have been presented Ronen et al, 2005;Lansley et al, 2007;Hons et al, 2008;Mancini et al, 2008). These authors report very similar results for the vertical component of 3C MEMS and conventional vertical-component geophone array data.…”