Shaken, not stirred: Priddis 2009 3C-2D hi-res acquisition

David C. Henley, Kevin W. Hall, Malcolm B. Bertram, Eric V. Gallant, Han-xing Lu, Rolf Maier

Over the last several years, CREWES has designed and conducted several field experiments intended to explore the limits of seismic resolution, coherent noise attenuation, and the practical and logistical limits of field acquisition pertaining to source effort and sensor density. We describe here the latest experiment in the sequence, carried out in March 2009 at our Priddis field site. The goals of this experiment were two-fold: we wanted a 3C-2D profile through the proposed site of our future permanent 4D test site; and we wanted yet another test of high-resolution seismic acquisition, this time increasing receiver spacing to obtain longer offsets, but decreasing source spacing to retain spatial resolution. We display here some of the results of that field work, which show that, in conditions of good source and receiver coupling, we can, indeed, increase receiver spacing and compensate by decreasing source spacing. This gives us the same processing power over surface wave noise, and the increased source effort results in remarkably good depth penetration, showing reflections down deeper than 2.5 seconds.