Improving Vibroseis Data Quality with the Vibrator-ground Model

Summary Vibroseis technology has earned worldwide popularity in land seismic exploration. The objective of the vibroseis method is for vibrators to produce a known and spatially stable vibroseis wavelet so that any variations in seismic reflection data can be used for the determination of subsurface geology. Therefore, to obtain high quality sub-surface images, it is very important and necessary to know the true vibroseis source wavelet that is propagated into the medium of the earth. This paper proposes a new model, which is referred to as the vibrator-ground model, to simulate the filtering effects of a complex vibrator-ground coupling system. With this vibrator-ground model the true vibroseis source signature can be estimated accurately. Furthermore, experimental tests demonstrate that the pilot sweep wavelet filtered by the vibrator-ground model can significantly improve the image quality.