Seismic Array Theorem and Survey Design by Constrained Optimization

The acquisition footprint noise in migrated sections consists of migration artifacts associated with a discrete recording geometry. Such noise can corrupt the interpretation of seismic sections, especially for AVO studies, so it is critical to design an optimal seismic survey that generates the smallest footprint. Our previous work showed that the Seismic Array Theorem can be used to design better surveys through the rapid trial and error computation of acquisition footprints for different survey geometries. However, trial and error analysis can be tedious and not always convergent. To avoid these pitfalls, we present an automatic method of constrained optimization to find the optimal survey design. In this procedure, the aperture size and number of traces are constrained and the optimization algorithm searches for the receiver and source spacing that minimizes the acquisition footprint. Examples with actual field data geometries show a rapid convergence to the optimal survey geometry.