Time-jittered marine sources

Current efforts towards dense shot (and/or receiver) sampling and full azimuthal coverage to produce higher-resolution images have led to the deployment of multiple source vessels across the survey area. A step ahead from multi-source seismic acquisition is simultaneous or blended acquisition where different source arrays/vessels fire shots at near-simultaneous or slightly random times. Seismic data acquisition with simultaneous (or blended) sources has helped improve acquisition efficiency and mitigate acquisition related costs. Deblending then aims to recover unblended data, as acquired during conventional acquisition, from blended data since many processing techniques rely on full, regular sampling. We present a simultaneous/blended marine acquisition setup where shots fire at significantly jittered instances in time resulting in jittered shot locations for a given speed of the source vessel. The conventional, unblended data is recovered from the blended, jittered/irregular data by sparsity-promoting inversion using the non-equispaced fast discrete curvelet transform. The optimization scheme aims to deblend the blended data along with regularization and interpolation to a (finer) regular grid.