Time‐lapse seismic surveying has become an accepted tool for reservoir monitoring applications, thus placing a high premium on data repeatability. One factor affecting data repeatability is the influence of the rough sea‐surface on the ghost reflection and the resulting seismic wavelets of the sources and receivers. During data analysis, the sea‐surface is normally assumed to be stationary and, indeed, to be flat. The non‐flatness of the sea‐surface introduces amplitude and phase perturbations to the source and receiver responses and these can affect the time‐lapse image. We simulated the influence of rough sea‐surfaces on seismic data acquisition. For a typical seismic line with a 48‐fold stack, a 2‐m significant‐wave‐height sea introduces RMS errors of about 5–10% into the stacked data. This level of error is probably not important for structural imaging but could be significant for time‐lapse surveying when the expected difference anomaly is small. The errors are distributed differently for sources and receivers because of the different ways they are towed. Furthermore, the source wavelet is determined by the sea shape at the moment the shot is fired, whereas the receiver wavelet is time‐varying because the sea moves significantly during the seismic record.

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A new type of airgun has been developed that has a greatly reduced acoustic output at high frequencies. The high frequencies originate from the rising edge of the primary pulse; the reduction has been achieved by a significant redesign of the mechanism that controls the air release. The environmental benefit of such a source is demonstrated and it is shown that the pulse-shape within the seismic imaging frequency range is substantially unaffected. The recently released 'Draft Guidance for Assessing the Effects of Anthropogenic Sound' from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, 2013) with its more stringent requirements on high-frequency sound has drawn this issue into a sharper focus.

International audienceWe compare three numerical methods to model the sea surface interaction in a marine seismic reflection experiment (the frequencies considered are in the band 10-100 Hz): the finite-difference method (FDM), the spectral element method (SEM) and the Kirchhoff method (KM). A plane wave is incident at angles of 0° and 30° with respect to the vertical on a rough Pierson-Moskowitz surface with 2 m significant wave height and the response is synthesized at 6, 10 and 50 m below the average height of the sea surface. All three methods display an excellent agreement for the main reflected arrival. The FDM and SEM also agree very well all through the scattered coda. The KM shows some discrepancies, particularly in terms of amplitudes

Three methods for estimation of the pressure wavefield generated by a marine airgun array are tested experimentally and compared. In the trial a variety of radiation angles and array configurations were used and some large synchronization errors were deliberately introduced. The source was equipped with near‐field hydrophones and a subsource ministreamer. A tethered far‐field hydrophone was used so that the three estimated far‐field signatures could be compared with an independent measurement. The knowledge of the source signature is important for on‐board source array QC, deconvolution, multiple attenuation, stratigraphic trap prediction, modelling and inversion, AVO analysis and reservoir monitoring. The methods perform very well and give estimates whose frequency‐domain spectra match the measured spectra to within a few dB and within a few tens of degrees of phase over the tested bandwidth of 3.5–110 Hz. The time‐domain error‐energy is typically only a few per cent of the signal energy for radiation angles within about 30° of the vertical. The third method proved to be sensitive to an experimental shortcoming leading to overloading of the ministreamer and meaningful comparison was not possible for some test configurations.