Pushing the resolution limits: The Priddis 3C-2D survey

David C. Henley, Kevin W. Hall, Malcolm B. Bertram, Eric V. Gallant

As improvements continue to be made in seismic acquisition equipment, particularly in the number of independent channels which can be recorded and in the manner in which field apparatus is assembled and connected in the field, we continue to press for increased spatial resolution and bandwidth of the recorded wavefield. An earlier experiment conducted near Longview in 2006 demonstrated some of the benefits of recording a 2D seismic line with closely spaced single geophones in order to properly sample not only the earth structure, but the source-generated noise, so that the latter can be properly characterized and removed. We describe here a recent survey conducted at the University of Calgary Priddis test site, in which we deployed 3-C geophones spaced 1 m apart, our most finely sampled survey to date. At this spacing, almost none of the coherent noise generated by the source, including the air wave, is aliased. We show that this fine sampling enables us to image the resulting data to very high resolution limits, both vertically and laterally.