The impact of tilted geophones on land seismic data quality

Abstract

The moving coil geophone is still the most commonly used sensor for land seismic surveys despite the introduction of other sensors. Modern geophone development has reached the stage where the signal recorded is of very high quality, but it can still be affected by the geophone being placed on an angle relative to the vertical ('tilt'). This paper describes the acquisition and analysis of field measurements using tilted geophones. It is shown that the critical angle of the 10 Hz geophones used for this test is 55°. For data recorded using vertically placed geophones separated by only 10 cm the perturbation level (the difference between the data recorded by adjacent geophones) averaged 8% and increased to more than 50% at tilt angles of 40º. The level of perturbation is heavily dependent on the orientation of the tilt angle relative to the source-detector axis, for example, for a geophone tilted at an angle of 30°, the perturbation varied between 14% and 48%. The obvious solution to these issues is to record data using sensors that have been planted extremely carefully or to use other sensors, such as digital accelerometers or 3C sensors that have the effect of tilt removed during processing.