Blended-acquisition design with irregular geometries for wide-azimuth sampling

The application of 3D symmetric and dense sampling is technically desirable when designing a seismic survey with wide-azimuth sampling. However, budgetary and operational constraints often hinder us from pursuing this ideal particularly under the current economic circumstances in the industry. The combined implementation of blending and efficient acquisition geometries enables us to acquire seismic data in a cost-effective manner. Subsequent deblending and data reconstruction allow for the retrieval of deblended and well-sampled data from blended and irregularly sampled data such that the desired data quality is also attainable. We propose a survey-design workflow that involves an iterative scheme to update survey parameters responsible for source blending as well as spatial sampling of detectors and sources. The optimized parameters subsequently yield satisfactory deblending and data reconstruction results. Numerical examples demonstrate the results of the proposed survey-design workflow for wide azimuth 3D geometries. Differences attributable solely to the parameter design are clearly recognizable. The optimized parameters lead to the improvement of deblending and data reconstruction quality and subsequently provide optimal acquisition designs.