Only dither: efficient simultaneous marine acquisition

Simultaneous-source acquisition is an emerging technology that is stimulating both geophysical research and commercial efforts. Simultaneous marine acquisition calls for the development of a new set of design principles and post-processing tools. The focus here is on simultaneous-source marine acquisition design and sparsity-promoting sequential-source data recovery. We propose a pragmatic simultaneous-source, randomized marine acquisition scheme where multiple vessels sail across an ocean-bottom array firing airguns at –- sequential locations and randomly time-dithered instances. By leveraging established findings from the field of compressive sensing, where the choice of the sparsifying transform needs to be incoherent with the compressive sampling matrix, we can significantly impact the reconstruction quality, and demonstrate that the compressive sampling matrix resulting from the proposed sampling scheme is sufficiently incoherent with the curvelet transform to yield successful recovery by sparsity promotion. Results are illustrated with simulations of “purely” random marine acquisition, which requires an airgun to be located at each source location, and random time-dithering marine acquisition with one and two source vessels. Size of the collected data volumes in all cases is the same. Compared to the recovery from the former acquisition scheme (SNR = 10.5dB), we get good results by dithering with only one source vessel (SNR = 8.06dB) in the latter scheme, which improve at the cost of having an additional source vessel (SNR = 9.85dB).