Online Talk | Factor 50: A Simple Way to Ensure you Don’t Get Burned by Ultra High-Resolution Seismic

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Topic: Factor 50: A Simple Way to Ensure you Don’t Get Burned by Ultra High-Resolution Seismic

Speaker: Nick Woodburn, RockWave

Abstract

After working in seismic processing & project development for 20 years with TGS, Nick co-founded the seismic processing company, RockWave, where the majority of its work is for the renewables sector. Most recently Nick has worked on 3D ultra high-resolution seismic for the offshore wind industry with his co-author, Dave Monk, and they wish to share a simple but effective concept when working with these data.

The offshore wind industry is in rapid growth, and this presents seismic geophysicists with many opportunities to continue their trade across the energy transition.

Ground models define the subsurface lithology and geotechnical soil parameters across proposed wind farm sites. Ultra high-resolution seismic (UHRS) provides a crucial role in the development of these subsurface engineering ground models.

In many ways UHRS is similar to seismic acquired for the uses of oil and gas exploration and carbon storage reservoir evaluation. However, key to understanding the unique challenges exhibited in UHRS is to recognize these data as having a similar number of octaves of bandwidth, but that this bandwidth is scaled up to higher frequencies by approximately 50. This factor of 50 is applicable to the spatial and temporal dimensions of the recorded seismic, the apparatus used to acquire the seismic, and the environmental conditions encountered during such acquisition. For example, acquiring UHRS in 1m swell would be equivalent to acquiring conventional seismic in 50m swell. Many further examples are shared and the implications of each one considered, thus demonstrating the usefulness of this factor as a simple aid in helping geophysicists who wish to transition to UHRS acquisition and processing.

This meeting is organised by the Geophysics SIG committee.