Real-time online seismic QC for marine operations

Real-time QC is onboard seismic source and data quality control performed as soon as the data is received during 3D or 2D marine seismic acquisition — providing instant confirmation of data quality without slowing down seismic crew operations.

Typical display delay: < 30 s
Channels in true real time: 1000s
No cluster required: 1 PC
QC displays: 32

Purpose

It is aimed at identifying any problems with seismic acquisition at the very moment they happen. This allows the seismic crew to fix problems immediately, minimising related loss of operational time and money.

GEOGALS onboard QC team in the vessel instrument room.

01Deliverables

Typical real-time QC products

This set of products helps control what is happening on board related to seismic acquisition. By monitoring them, QC personnel and observers can easily identify out-of-spec issues — many of which require immediate action and reporting.

Source control products

Near-field hydrophone signature
Bubble peak amplitude, time and period maps and plots
Source towing depth plots
Flip–flop source identity plots

Data control products

Shot gathers, near-trace gathers
SOR / EOR / TARGET RMS amplitude maps
Signal-to-noise ratio map
Real-time 2D CMP/CSS stacks
Frequency plots

Detects in real time

bad shots
dead or weak channels
source air leakages
misfires
flip–flop source identity loss
low signal-to-noise ratio
strong noises

02Performance

High performance, low overheads

The software runs locally on a PC, saving processing time on your cluster nodes. It connects to the data storage and inputs a shot record as soon as it is written. Each shot is read only once, to avoid network overload. After a shot is loaded into the local RAM of the PC, it is input to pre-defined QC flows that all run in parallel locally. All real-time displays run and update locally as well, without slowing down the network.

This, along with optimised processing algorithms, allows QC of data from thousands of channels in true real time — typical delays are less than half a minute — using just a good modern PC with a multi-core CPU, 64-bit Windows OS and several monitors. Compare this to some conventional QC packages which claim to be real-time, while in practice have dozens of shots delayed even when working on a powerful Linux cluster.

03How it looks

Typical QC displays

Screenshots taken from live operations — not mock-ups.

Source QC displays: near-field hydrophone stack, bubble peak amplitude, time and period maps — Source QC: near-field hydrophone stack, bubble peak amplitude, time and period maps

Data QC display: shot gather with automatic first-break picking — Data QC: shot gather with automatic first-break pick

Data QC display: real-time CMP stack — Data QC: real-time CMP stack

Data QC display: real-time RMS amplitude map — Data QC: real-time RMS amplitude map

Flexibility and power in real time

The flows that every shot record passes through in real time are fully customisable and completely defined by the operator. Nearly any processing and analysis available in RadExPro can be performed in real time. This includes AGC and other amplitude corrections, frequency and FK filtering, predictive and spiking deconvolutions, statics, auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions, automatic first-break picking, and calculation of amplitude and frequency attributes for different time windows and their derivatives. You can select data from particular channels or from one particular airgun group and process them separately, select only traces that exceed a given energy level, and more.

Saving and exporting results

The operator can set up real-time flows to save raw records, processed and edited traces, maps, picks, calculated attribute values and any other QC results to the processing project database. Then, in playback mode, the data can be exported to SEG-Y files and calculated attributes exported to ASCII.

06Deployments

Configured per vessel

Hardware structure is adapted to the specifics of each individual vessel.

RV Ivan Gubkin

Hardware structure map — configuration 2018

RV Vyacheslav Tikhonov

Hardware structure map — configuration 2014

Onboard QC team

Configuration 2021, adapted to the specifics of the individual vessel

Start a project

Send us the survey. We will tell you what the data can give you.

Acquisition parameters, data volume, objectives, timeline. Our geophysicists come back with a processing sequence and a realistic view of the result — not a brochure.

Contact our team info@geogals.ee