Processing of Non-Impulsive Moving Sources data for structural and 4D imaging: illustrations on SEAM models

Abstract

Marine vibrator sources offer many advantages for seismic acquisitions compared to classical airguns (Laws et al, 2019). The first advantage is a reduced environmental footprint, emitting only the required frequencies together with a significant reduction of the instantaneous peak energy due to an increased emission time. It can also emit very repeatable and specially tailored signals to favor specific frequency bands. One specificity of marine vibrators is that they emit for few seconds while the source vessel is in motion, which results in recorded data affected by the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect is a function of both the boat speed and the apparent velocity of the seismic events. We investigate pre-processing steps to mitigate the Doppler effect and analyze its impact for 3D and 4D imaging.