Marine Vibrator Array Design An OBS Example

Marine seismic vibrators were introduced in the early 1970’s but have not achieved wide commercial use probably due to the relative simplicity and versatility of marine air-gun sources.

There has recently been a resurgence of interested in marine vibrators due to their low environmental impact and because they are more controllable and efficient than air- gun arrays. In this paper we discuss the optimal design of marine vibrator sweeps for ocean-bottom seismic surveys using a sweep generation approach guided by signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

As example, we use the SNR estimated from ocean bottom recordings in the North Sea. We describe a vibrator tow depth optimization approach based on the minimum achievable frequency and sweep length and design low- and high-frequency sweeps covering the 3-125Hz band.