Full-Wavefield, Towed-Marine Seismic Acquisition and Applications

A four-component (4C) streamer recording pressure, as well as the three-component (3C) particle velocity vector, addresses long-standing geophysical problems such as receiver-side sampling and deghosting. In this paper, we introduce multicomponent marine seismic sources generating monopole and dipole responses in the water. We describe a few different alternatives for generating such a source using existing technology. Three different application areas are described in some detail: source-side deghosting, source-side wavefield reconstruction and, finally, a vector-acoustic reverse-time imaging approach that requires monopole and dipole data on both the source and receiver side of the acquisition.