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Teepee technology applied to design acquisition of seismic P-waves, Part 2—3D land example

Dawson Geophysical, Midland, Texas, U.S.

John M. Hufford, Gary M. Hoover and Warren H. Neff

Bartlesville, Oklahoma, U.S.

Corresponding author: JohnHufford@cableone.net

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

In part 1 of this three-part series, seismic subsurface illumination using the concept of "teepees" was introduced and described. This second installment presents a 3D land design example to demonstrate how the teepee optimizes seismic recording projects for cost and collecting data that will produce the desired imaging quality.

Subsurface teepees are the building blocks of the 3D survey. If the bin-to-bin characteristics of fold, azimuth, and offset are to be uniform (critical to the interpretation process), each subsurface teepee must be of equal size, shape, and resolution. To ensure uniformity with fold, the teepee overlap in each dimension must be an integer multiple of the respective teepee dimension.

The first step in the survey design process is determination of the proper teepee size and shape. The second step is to ascertain the associated surface configuration or "apparent spread" (assuming unlimited recording equipment that creates the teepee). The third step is to determine the teepee overlap or multiplicity in each dimension. The fourth step is to calculate the number of apparent spread configurations required in each dimension to properly image the subsurface area. The fifth step optimizes the surface configuration, based on source and/or equipment limitations, to minimize the project cost. The sixth and last step integrates the optimized surface configuration into the final acquisition design to be implemented in the field.

The example surveys will be acquired with the following constraints as defined by the integrated team. The geometry type is to be full source-to-receiver azimuth with offset, normally labeled "true" 3D. Thus the length-to-width ratio of the teepee dimensions will be approximately one. The bin size is 25 m in both dimensions, which determines the surface source/receiver trace densities to be 50 m. The required fold is 48, and the maximum source-to-receiver offset is 4500 m. The subsurface . . . [Full Text of this Article]