Data driven Orientation Determination of Multicomponent Seismic Sensors

Data driven Orientation Determination of Multicomponent Seismic Sensors

Patterson, F.

Bagaini, C. (mentor)
Van Manen, D.-J. (mentor)

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Geoscience & Engineering

IDEA League Joint Master's in Applied Geophysics

2016-08-31

The orientation of a three component sensor in seabed seismic needs to be known to successfully process the acquired data. Although it is often measured, the data processing centers are requested to estimate it when these measurements are corrupted or to validate them. A large class of methods used in the industry perform well in the presence of uniform shot coverage but suffer when shots are partly missing, for example because of obstructions. I develop multiple novel algorithms that either make use of the source-receiver geometry or the knowledge of the seabed elastic properties around the receiver to determine the orientation of the three sensor axes. The seabed properties are used to model the response of the seabed to an incident pressure wave. The new routines are tested on real and synthetic data. All the new approaches perform better than Schlumbergers legacy proprietary processing software in retrieving a known receiver orientation from synthetic data, if the shot coverage is non-uniform. The application to real data also indicates that the new algorithm matches the results of the existing methods when the shot coverage is uniform and outperform them when there are large gaps. Especially the model based approach solves the problem of determining the orientation of a receiver entirely if the knowledge of the compressional and shear wave velocities of the seabeds is good enough.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8d87b84d-b53d-476d-a85e-5cc115f7cd47

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Patterson, F.