Strategies for waveform processing in sparker data

A sparker is a marine seismic impulsive source used for high-resolution seismic surveys. Sparker sources were very popular during the late 1960s and 1970s before being supplanted by small volume airguns. However, in the last 10 years there has been renewed interest in sparker technology because (1) it can be easily deployed at relatively low costs and (2) in certain areas the use of small airguns is restricted for environmental purposes. In this study a sparker source was used to assess the seismic stratigraphy of Quaternary deposits and to image the sediment/bedrock interface. Three different inverse filtering methods were tested (i.e., spiking deconvolution, match-filtering and vertical seismic profile (VSP) deconvolution) to correct the poor shot-to-shot repeatability of the source and to compress its reverberations. Results show that the matched-filter and VSP deconvolution methods, which design and apply one operator for each shot, produced comparable results, whereas the spiking deconvolution that used the same operator on all traces failed to compress the source signature properly.