Sensitivity Analysis of a Two Component Seismic Streamer.

Abstract

Conventional marine seismic streamers use hydrophone sensors to measure the seismic wave field. One well known problem in marine seismic is that up-going waves are reflected with inverted polarity at the sea surface because of the air-water interface. The interference between the up-going and down-going wave fields create nulls or notches in the recorded spectrum. A two-component streamer includes particle motion sensors in addition to hydrophones to measure the particle velocity of the seismic wave field. By combining the data acquired by pressure and particle motion sensors, the up-going wave field can be computed from the measured total wave field. In seismic acquisition system, data quality is negatively affected by source, receiver, ambient noise, and other system perturbations. Different types of sensors may be subjected to different types of noise, perturbations and have different transfer function. In this thesis, we have analyzed the impact of several types of perturbations on synthetic marine seismic data. We present the impact of individual perturbations using a sensitivity chart. We demonstrate the relative significance of these perturbations and the need to focus on reducing them. According to our analysis, the most significant errors were due to polarity reversals and sensor sensitivity.