Seismic Training 1-2

As we're not in the field we're now going to read a file back from disk that we recorded
earlier so we can see what a typical field looks like and how we can manipulate it in
the field to quality control the data and make sure that the data we're recording is of
good enough quality to interpret later on I will make it clear at this point that the
software that comes with the geode which is called size module controller is field
acquisition software it is not data processing software which we'll cover in a separate
tutorial using size images software so at the moment we have our three windows we
have our shop window on noise monitor and our log file now from now on we're going
to be purely looking at the shop window the other two windows very relevant so I'll
maximize the shop window and I'll come here to file read disk and I shall read back a
file that we recorded earlier in the field click on open and now we see a typical
refraction data set down at the bottom here on the geometry it shows the geophone
positions it shows that we had a geophone missing at location number seven because
we had an obstruction along the line so we couldn't place a geophone at this position
and then offset from geophone number 24 is our hammer position way over here on
the right of the screen if we examine the data on the screen we can see very clearly
that channel number 17 is very noisy and there's no real signal on it most probably
this was caused by a Fault in the cable but we still have 20 in this case 22 active
geophones so we have enough data to work with we'll come here to display anything
that we do within the display window will only affect the cosmetics of the screen doesn't
affect the raw data which is recorded on to disk so for example if I come across here
to display boundary if I wish to expand or contract the viewed record I can come here
to my end time and if I put in 0.5 of a second we'll see now that the data is compressed
if I wish to expand it again I'll put in 0.2 and we'll expand it out because really for
refraction we're only interested in this top portion of the screen up here from our t0
which is our trigger point down to where our first arrivals are which in this case that
this location here if I wish to examine for example the first 12 channels in more detail
I can put in number number 12 as my end channel click on apply so now I'm only
displaying the first 12 channels and so on we'll put this back to the original acquisition
parameters click on OK back into display now at the moment we're displaying the data
in a fixed gain style which is the most applicable method of gain display for refraction
data and it means that the gain which is applied to the signal is the same across the
whole recorded length of this of our data file our trace style is variable we have three
different options with the geode I can turn off the shading totally if I wish or I can have
a halfway house in between the variable area and the wiggle trace which is called
shaded and also which we can apply to any three of the trace tiles I can clip the
waveforms which is quite a useful feature if we're trying to pick our first arrivals and
we've got large amplitudes on adjacent traces which may be over writing our first
arrivals if I click on apply' you can instantly see now that all of our waves have got their
apparent peaks and troughs chopped off and they're not overwriting the adjacent
channels if I don't like this effect I can simply turn it off and go back to how it was
before so using this window you can choose which is the display method which you
prefer best we'll use variable area in this case now we may want to adjust the trace
sizes we can do this by letting the computer do it for us by coming over to do survey
and clicking on the six Auto scale traces at the moment this hasn't done apparently
anything because the computer is quite happy with the trace amplitude which it sees
within this recorded time window but whilst the trace amplitudes may be perfectly
acceptable here over here on the right for the upper channel numbers once we come
down here to channels one through five or six then the trace amplitude is probably
greater than what would be reasonable so if I come here to file to display shop
parameters display gains and I'm now going to select individual click on OK and at the
bottom right of the screen I get across and I can use the up and down left and right
arrows to adjust the amplitude on any particular channel the channel which is active
which I'm working on is highlighted in green so now I'm using the down arrow key and
we can see the trace amplitude being reduced move across the channel number two
and so on you need to adjust the trace amplitude so that you can still see the first
arrivals quite sharply but you're not distorting the data when I'm happy that I've got my
trace amplitudes adjusted correctly I click on escape to come out of the edit mode it's
important with seismic refraction that you do examine the data closely in the field
because it's absolutely critical that you're able to identify where these first arrival points
are or first breaks if you like because quite often what looks like good data when you're
in the field when you come back to the office to try and edit the data and process it to
interpret it these first arrivals may not seem very sharp but by then it's too late at the
moment if I wish to increase the amplitude of these and therefore process the data
with the greater accuracy I can stack more times with the sledgehammer which will
increase my signal-to-noise ratio and make these first arrivals sharper the final thing
which we'll just talk about right now is within the shot parameters our display filters at
the moment these are off and similarly to the acquisition filters I can apply some filters
to the recorded data however unlike the acquisition filters these filters we can change
so if we don't like the effect I can simply turn them off and go back so for example if I
apply a low-cut filter of 30 Hertz click on apply you can see that our data has now been
cleaned up a little bit if I go right there way up and let's put this in 100 Hertz a large
amount of the amplitude of our data has gone which means most of our data has got
a dominant frequency lower than 100 Hertz so in this case this is probably not a very
good filter to use so I'll turn it back down again and apply filter of 20 Hertz when we
get our data back or I can turn it off totally you