Geology 444 Class 3: 

Geometry
From class 2 one approach to seismic processing is clear: if we can get a perfect zero-offset
section, then we can migrate this to get the PRS and convert it into depth to get the Earth model
that we want to interpret.

There are some problems with this approach though:

 A real near-trace section is not a good approximation to the perfect zero-offset section,
even though we might hope it would be. Multiples are a particular problem.
 Typically there is too much energy needed in the seismic source to have a coincident
receiver. For example, consider a crustal scale survey to image an amplitude reflection
coefficient of 0.1 at 30km depth:

We expect a reflection amplitude of 0.1*(3*104)-2 to be returned, about 10-10 the

amplitude of the source. Under most circumstances we need a ground velocity of at least
10nm/s to record anything worthwhile -- I know a few places where less might be
acceptable, but they are untypical! This means that at 1m from the source the ground
velocity must be 10m/s, which most receivers will not survive. It is fairly typical for
geophones within 500m or so of a crustal-scale explosive shot to be shaken loose from
the ground.

 If we just have a zero-offset section, even without other problems, seismic velocity is
totally indeterminate. We will never be able to make the transition to the depth section.

The solution: multi-offset data

If we record data at more than one source-receiver offset, then we may be able to figure out some
of these problems. We will get at least some information on the velocities, and we may be able to
reduce the energy of the multiples: essentially we can combine a number of non-zero offset
sections into something that, if we are lucky, might approximate a perfect zero-offset section.

Lets start by looking at a group of traces which all have the same reflection point from a horizon
within the Earth (a Common Depth Point or CDP gather).
Four different shots and four different receiver locations are used here to illuminate a single
region of the subsurface. (Conventionally a star is used for a source and a triangle for a receiver.)
We could in principle collect this data with a single source and single receiver if we wanted, and
set the source 4 times for each CDP location, but look what happens when we also consider other
CDPs in the same line:

Now we have rays from 3 CDPs displayed: the different line styles show the different CDPs.
Now the different colors can be seen to show rays with the same source location. To see this
more clearly, extract a subset of the sources:
What the ray diagram shows is that we should be able to collect the traces we need for
multioffset CDP gathers by using shots recorded simultaneously at several different receiver
locations, minimizing the acquisition effort. Since the source is mostly close to omnidirectional
this is an efficient use of energy that would otherwise be wasted. Now look more closely at a
single shot gather:

The heavy lines show the rays from the figure above, the lighter lines show rays that would be
recorded by our survey, but we didnt use in any of the CDP gathers above. What happened?
Well, we started looking at CDPs with the same spacing as our receivers and shots, whereas this
leaves the energy from any one shot and half of our receivers unused. With this regular geometry
and a flat-layered Earth, we have CDP locations at half the spacing of our shot or receiver
locations. If we consider a single shot gather, the reflection points are at half our receiver
spacing, which is the CDP spacing typically used in reflection processing.

Conventional 2-D Geometry

Remember that a seismic trace simply represents the response of the earth under a particular
source measured with a particular receiver characteristic . In the case we will discuss here, that
is a point source and a point receiver. A given trace can be described by those two parameters
(and mostly the combination will be unique). This means that we can describe any sample
recorded in a 2D survey in terms of 3 quantities:
 The shot location
 The receiver location

 The time of the sample

Stacking charts

The 2D survey gives a 3D volume of samples. Suppose we look down on the top of this volume,
and represent each trace by a dot:
This shows a stacking chart for a survey where a line 10km long had a shot and a receiver every
500m with every shot being recorded into all the receivers. A vertical line here corresponds to
traces with the same shot location, a shot gather; a horizontal line corresponds to traces with the
same receiver location, a receiver gather. Colors of the dots indicate the distance between the
source and receiver: offset = source x - receiver x. The diagonal axis gives the location of the
zero-offset section (source x = receiver x). Any set of points along a line perpendicular to the
diagonal axis indicates traces with a common midpoint where the geometric midpoint cmp x =
0.5*(source x + receiver x). The coordinates along the zero-offset section give the location of the
CMP which intersects at that point - the zero-offset trace in a CMP must have a shot and receiver
located at that CMP location. (For why I started using CMP, not CDP see later)

We can illustrate the main coordinates used in seismic acquisition and processing: acquisition
coordinates are shown in black and final processing coordinates are shown in red. Note that
midpoint varies along the common-offset axis, while offset varies along the common mid-point
axis (just as a common-shot gather will extend along the receiver axis.)
We can also envisage other types of stacking chart: a marine chart with shot spacing twice the
receiver spacing would look like this:
In this case the boat is going toward +ve locations (since the receivers are always at locations
less than the shot). The dots are more closely spaced in the receiver direction. A split-spread with
the same shot:receiver ratio looks like this:
Fold

For any gather we are often interested in how many traces it contains. The reason is basically that
if we add traces within a gather, we (hopefully) will increase the signal to noise ratio by an
amount equal to the square root of the number of traces in the gather. The most important gather
is the CMP gather generally so the fold of a survey is the number of traces in a CMP gather.
From a stacking chart you can simply draw a line for the CMP gather and count the number of
dots, however this is tedious when there are lots of channels. For a conventional multichannel
survey we use a CMP spacing of half the receiver spacing, and then:

Fold = Number of channels * receiver spacing / (2*shot spacing)

Looking at the stacking charts though you will see that fold is not neccessarily constant along a
line: for a regular geometry with a split-spread or off-end shooting pattern we would quote the
highest value. For the first geometry, a typical value (the same is true of uneven geometries.)
Particularly notice that at the ends of either the split-spread or off-end geometries the number of
traces in a CMP is lower, and increases to full fold over roughly half the spread length. In fact,
since a full-fold CMP is one which contains the largest range of offsets, each CMP contains only
every (Nchans/fold)th trace. Thus the distance over which fold increases (or decreases) is
CMP spacing *(Nchans - Nchans/fold)
which simply reduces to Nchans*Receiver spacing/2 - shot spacing, ie a fraction under half the
spread length.

Generalizing geometry
Its very easy to deal with a regular 2D geometry, but unfortunately these are rare in real data.
What happens with an irregular geometry or in 3D? The generalization introduces another
important concept in seismic processing, that of binning. Basically we define geometric
midpoints as before (calculating from the correct shot and receiver locations) and design a
binning strategy where we divide the surface of the earth into (mostly regular size and shape)
regions called bins, and say that if a trace's midpoint falls within a given bin, the trace is within
that gather. Rather than a line on the stacking chart we include a region adjacent to that line also.
Each trace still falls within one (and only one!) bin, but the midpoints may not match any simple
survey property; depending on the geometry and the aims they may still be rectangular (as for a
typical 3D survey), radial, or with complicated crooked line land geometries may wiggle along a
profile. The size of the bins is determined by how high we want the fold to be to achieve some
purpose, and how even we want the fold to stay.

CDPs and CMPs

So why did we stop talking about CDP and start talking about CMP instead (and why does
ProMAX always refer to CDP)? The reason is simple: a CDP gather contains traces which have
reflection points beneath a small region of the Earth; a CMP gather contains traces whose
source-receiver midpoint lies in a small region of the Earth's surface. The midpoint is a purely
geometrical construction for which we only need to know the experiment geometry whereas to
determine depth points we need to know something about the Earth structure. In the case of a 1-
D structure (varies only in depth) the two match, otherwise we must correctly migrate a midpoint
section to get a depth-point section. We will see later that a CMP if there is lateral variation will
generally not correspond to common depth points. As to the second question, ProMAX (along
with 90% of the literature and processors) is sloppy...