3D UHRS
Freedom to reposition your structures throughout pre-construction phase with data everywhere.
As every geoscientist will tell you, geological features and geohazards exist in three dimensions and so should your seismic data.
3D hi-resolution (HR) or ultra-high resolution (UHR) seismic should therefore become standard for site survey and wind farm site characterisation. However, we recognise that cost and timing of such expenditure is a major barrier to this being realised.
What is clear, is that for those geoscientists who manage to convince their senior management to allocate sufficient budget towards acquiring 3D HRS/UHRS, they will need to ensure the acquisition is appropriately designed to image the subsurface features that require derisking.
For example, if buried boulders are a concern at an offshore wind development, it would be prudent to design a 3D survey with appropriate spatial and vertical resolution to image the boulders’ expected size and depth. Forward modelling performed by Nick Woodburn (RockWave Technical Director), can help with this and other aspects of your 3D survey design. Read his paper here.
Further consideration should be given to the accuracy of the velocity model that can be generated using the 3D seismic data. 3D UHRS survey set-ups typically have short streamers, which are inferior to longer cables when attempting to obtain reliable velocity information.
Whichever setup is right for your site, with the exponential growth in data volumes and push for more advanced processing with inversion-ready pre-stack data, you will need to call upon our effectively unlimited high-performance compute (HPC) resources available on a high bandwidth, low latency network.
In 2022 RockWave completed the processing of a 3D UHRS P-Cable survey over proposed WTG locations at Vineyard Wind, East Coast USA. This survey is considered to be one of the highest trace-density datasets ever acquired offshore, with a source-over-streamer configuration and interleaved swaths to obtain a 0.75 x 0.75 m bin size. Read about that project here.
Contact a RockWave geophysicist about processing your next 3D seismic survey.
Related services: UHRS Reprocessing, Depth Imaging, FWI
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