Water Reverberation Travel Time Analysis Acquired Using Multi-Depth Streamers

Abstract

Ghost reflections and water reverberations are major and inevitable seismic noises in marine seismic exploration. More recently, new receiver deployment techniques at different sea depths for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement are developing. The reverberation characteristics must be known before applying the reverberation attenuation methods. This paper studies the characteristics of reverberations acquired using multi-depth streamers by analyzing the seismic ray path geometry and the scaled physical model data. The study results show that the primary reflection waveforms and reverberations are broadened with an increase in offset. The reverberation waveforms are quite different from those of primary reflections due to the wide-angle reflection. Under shallow water and small spread approximation, new arrival time equations for the primary reflections and reverberations are derived and fit the scaled physical model data very well. The depth-arrival time relationships of the primary reflections and reverberations in the common-source vertical-array gather are linear but their depth-arrival time relationship slopes are different. The primary reflection slopes are the same for different common-source vertical-array offsets but the reverberation slopes increase with offsets.