Source/receiver array directivity effects on marine seismic attenuation measurements

Attenuation of seismic waves, quantified by the seismic quality factor Q, holds important information for seismic interpretation, due to its sensitivity to rock and fluid properties. A recently published study of Q, based on surface seismic reflection data, used a modified spectral ratio approach (QVO), but both source and receiver responses were treated as isotropic, based on simple raypath arguments. Here, this assumption has been tested by computing apparent attenuation generated by frequency‐dependent directivity of typical marine source and receiver arrays and acquisition geometries. Synthetic wavelet spectra were computed for reflected rays, summed over the first Fresnel zone, from the base of a single interval, 50–3000 m thick and velocity 2000 m/s, overlying a 2200 m/s half‐space, and for offsets of 71–2071 m. The source and receiver geometry were those of an actual survey.

The modelled spectra are clearly affected by directivity, most strongly because of surface ghosts. In general, the strong high‐frequency component, produced by the array design, leads to apparently negative attenuation in individual reflection events, though this is dependent on offset and target depth. For shallow targets (less than 400–500 ms two‐way traveltime (TWT) depth), apparent Q‐values as extreme as −50 to −100 were obtained. For deeper target depths, the directivity effect is far smaller. The implications of the model study were tested on real data. QVO was applied to 20 true‐spectrum‐processed CMPs, in a shallow (405–730 ms TWT) and a deeper (1000–1300 ms TWT) interval, firstly using a measured far‐field source signature (effectively isotropic), and secondly using computed directivity effects instead. Mean interval Q⁻¹‐values for the deeper interval, 0.029 ± 0.011 and 0.027 ± 0.018 for conventional and directional processing, respectively, suggested no directivity influence on attenuation estimation. For the shallow interval (despite poor spectral signal‐to‐noise ratios and hence scattered attenuation estimates), directional processing removed directivity‐generated irregularities from the spectral ratios, resulting in an improvement from Q⁻¹int = −0.036 ± 0.130 to a realistic Q⁻¹int = 0.012 ± 0.030: different at 94% confidence level. Equivalent Q‐values are: for the deeper interval, 35 and 37 for conventional and directional processing, respectively, and −28 and 86 for the shallow interval.

These results support the conclusions of the model studies, i.e. that source/receiver directivity has a negligible effect except for shallow targets (e.g. TWT depth ≤ 500 ms) imaged with conventional acquisition geometry. In such cases directivity corrections to spectra are strongly recommended.