Our Services
Marine 2D, 3D, Time and Depth seismic processing for multiple energy and engineering sectors.
"At a personal level we thoroughly enjoyed working with RockWave. Meetings were efficient, productive and fun. Nice people to do business with."
Services
Trusted toolbox fine tuned to clean and optimise your data pre-migration.
Extracting shallow information from deep O&G exploration data.
Single sensor imaging with sparker, boomer, pinger, chirp, innomar and more.
Velocity modelling and depth migrations for truer representation of Earth.
Freedom to reposition your structures throughout the planning phase.
2D/3D imaging with longer offsets with improved velocity information.
Time Processing
Trusted toolbox fine tuned to clean and optimise your data pre-migration.
Our people have access to one of the most trusted toolboxes in O&G seismic processing, DUG Insight. Combining this with the power and scalability of cloud computing means there is no longer a compromise to make by choosing a small, service-minded and flexible processing shop over a corporate warehouse.
If you want clean gathers going into Depth Velocity Model Building (VMB) then you need to pay attention to details within your Time processing sequence. We will listen to your challenges and design a processing sequence to solve them, taking your field data on a journey through the following as a minimum:
-
Noise attenuation: separating swell, seismic interference, linear noise from true reflection signal.
-
Designature: bubble pulse suppression and zero-phase conversion, making use of near-field hydrophone (NFH) data to create far-field signatures.
-
Broadband: bandwidth enhancement through inversion-based source & receiver side deghosting and Q compensation.
-
Multiple attenuation: SWME (Shallow Water Multiple Elimination), SRME (Surface Related Multiple Estimation), IMA (Interbed Multiple Attenuation), Tau-P Deconvolution, Radon.
-
Velocity modelling: Anisotropic Time Tomography, Interval Velocity Picking, CMP Trim statics, eta correction.
-
Migration: 4D regularisation and Kirchhoff pre-stack time migration (PSTM).
Read about our Time and Depth processing project with ONE-Dyas prior to their successful appraisal drilling campaign in 2021/22.
Depth Imaging
Velocity modelling and depth migrations for truer representation of Earth.
Nothing is off limits with the toolbox available to RockWave. We can build a velocity model with confidence and select the most suitable velocity model building tools and migration algorithms according to your project’s specific geological challenges. The input data is conditioned accordingly and can be taken at any input stage through the Time pre-processing sequence (see above) to optimise the efficiency of the model building workflow.
Depth Velocity Model Building (VMB) is performed using either high resolution gridded tomography (HRTomo) or full waveform inversion (FWI), which utilises the complete seismic wavefield, or a combination of both. Anisotropy can be incorporated with or without the availability of wells. Lateral and vertical variations in Q can also be derived and incorporated into the final migration.
DUG Insight is a renowned interpretation software package, that allows the geologist and geophysicist to collaborate inside the same project to assess the accuracy of each velocity model update.
The seismic data and velocity model can be migrated using conventional or Least-Squares (LS) versions of Kirchhoff PreSDM or Reverse Time Migration (RTM) algorithms. The characteristics of each are as follows:
Kirchhoff PreSDM: Robust, stable, cost-effective and applicable to many geological settings.
-
VTI, HTI, TTI or Orthorhombic anisotropy
-
2D & 3D datasets
RTM: Capable of handling complex geology, including steep dips, multi-pathing and abrupt lateral velocity changes.
-
VTI or TTI anisotropy
-
Outputs surface-offset gathers (SOG)
-
Scenario RTM (sRTM) for rapid scenario testing
-
2D & 3D datasets
Repurposing
Extracting shallow information from deep O&G exploration data.
As Sir David Attenborough says, "If there's one thing we all have to do, it is to avoid waste".
Offshore Wind, CO2/Hydrogen Storage, Geological Disposal Facility. Whatever your purpose, if there is seismic data available over your location, we know how to extract useful information from it.
Offshore UK alone, the NDR contains huge seismic data volumes available to download to your workstation. However, these data were acquired and processed for the O&G industry, meaning they will have disregarded the shallow information that is important to you. Our Repurposing workflows start from the original data, before this important shallow subsurface information was thrown away, then optimise for your purpose.
Read our article on our 2021 project to Repurpose O&G seismic for SSE, Maribeni and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
3D UHRS
Freedom to reposition your structures throughout the planning phase.
Combining the high-end 3D O&G processing expertise of RockWave people, with extension into shallow seismic and renewables has made our service proposition hard to beat when it comes to processing your 3D UHRS data.
RockWave people have been processing 3D P-Cable data since 2013. Back then, such datasets were acquired in hi-resolution (0.5-1ms sampling rate) to image shallow O&G exploration targets such as Wisting in the Barents Sea.
Today the Offshore Wind industry is beginning to embrace this configuration and combine with an ultra-high resolution (sub 0.25ms sampling rate) seismic source and recording system. In 2022 we completed the processing of a 3D UHRS P-Cable survey over proposed WTG locations at a windfarm offshore US East Coast. 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 0.75x0.75m bin size.
With the exponential growth in data volumes and push for more advanced processing, such as depth velocity model building alongside inversion to obtain geotechnical rock properties, you will need to call upon the effectively unlimited high-performance compute (HPC) resources available to RockWave on a high bandwidth, low latency network.
We would love to share with you our case-studies of successful deghosting, 3D statics solutions, and 3D SRME. All of which take into account the impact of wave-motion and variable cable depths at these frequency bandwidths. Get in touch and we can arrange a meeting.
Single-Channel UHRS
Single sensor imaging with sparker, boomer, pinger, chirp, innomar and more.
Sub-bottom profiler (SBP) data provides an image of the top ~10m of subsurface geology but can dramatically vary in quality of image, depending on acquisition conditions and whether the data has been adequately processed. We have seen many examples of “processed” SBP data, which exhibit issues with statics and a long, narrowband (or ringy) source signature that masks information in the very top 2-3mbsf. We will reprocess your existing data to correct these issues and maximise the very shallow subsurface information for your cable route or inter-array.
Single channel ultra-high resolution seismic (S-UHRS), although lacking in some areas compared to M-UHRS, does have some clear advantages over it’s more expensive alternative;
-
Efficient to acquire (short line turns)
-
Wider variety of capable vessels therefore increased availability
-
Did we mention that it is cheaper?
That being said, the advantages are immediately nullified if the raw data are not processed optimally. Read about our early 2022 project where we reprocessed S-UHRS for an Irish Sea developer and obtained a huge uplift in data quality over the original data.
With both these data types, it is best to get the processing right first time. Contact us about performing the onshore final processing of your next SBP and S-UHRS data acquisition and avoid the need for reprocessing.
Multi-Channel UHRS
2D/3D imaging with longer offsets with improved velocity information.
The majority of wind farm arrays now acquire multi-channel ultra-high resolution (M-UHRS) data, with three clear benefits:
Modern sparker or boomer sources will provide a clear image between 0-150mbsf, way beyond the penetration range of sub-bottom profiler source types.
Typical towed streamers will have 48-96 hydrophones for improved signal to noise ratio and enough offset to capture information about the velocity (and density) of the sediments and bedrock, which can also be useful for obtaining other properties of interest to a foundation engineer, through seismic inversion.
Offset diversification is helpful to the seismic processing geophysicist, who uses the information to produce a more detailed seismic image, with less noise, less multiple, and higher bandwidth and resolution through ghost removal.
You should always question the seismic data underpinning any ground model upon which foundations for your site are being designed. Are you confident your existing M-UHRS data is providing an accurate representation of the ground conditions?
We have reprocessed M-UHRS data for a multitude of developers and geo-engineers, where entire geological interfaces have appeared, as if by magic, having not been picked up in the original model. Let us confirm that your seismic is fit for purpose.
You should never have to reprocess M-UHRS data. Instead, you should get it right first time. That is why we partner with geophysical survey contractors to perform their onshore final seismic processing, ensuring an accurate and detailed representation of the subsurface.
