In recent years, there has been much interest in seismic imaging within the marine environment via four-component (4-C) ocean-bottom-cable (OBC) recording. The 4-C OBC sensor is equipped with a single hydrophone (pressure detector) plus a three-component (3-C) geophone (particle velocity detector). The 3-C geophone records the full three-dimensional ground motion via one vertical component and two orthogonal horizontal components. 4-C OBC recording has several advantages over conventional towed-streamer technology, including:
This article explores many of these elastic-wave imaging possibilities from a simple mathematical viewpoint and presents synthetic and real data examples for these applications.
Figure 1 shows the simplest situation—a...