Land Seismic Low Frequencies: Acquisition, Processing and Full Wave Inversion Of 1.5 - 86 Hz

Summary Advances in the land seismic vibroseis industry in understanding the emission and recording of very low frequencies, lead Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) to introduce as standard a 9 s custom sweep of bandwidth 1.5-86 Hz into their production seismic. This step followed extensive field testing from late 2010 into 2011, which took the many limitations imposed by vibrator: reaction mass displacement; maximum pump flow rate and piston stroke etc. into consideration. In addition to applicable standard seismic data processing, a number of processing steps were further introduced to correct for and recover the recorded low frequencies. First, a phase filter was applied to correct for the effect of recording electronics at the low end frequencies. Then a geophone correction was applied to compensate for the usage of the 10 Hz geophones. Preliminary processing has revealed seismic images enhanced by the presence of low frequencies. Targets at depth appear more coherent, and can now be readily traced. A successful attempt to run FWI Inversion took place on the data to obtain hands off velocity model.