Hunting high and low in marine seismic acquisition; combining wide-tow top sources with front sources

Placing marine sources on the top of the seismic streamer spread improves resolution and reservoir inversion in shallow and intermediate depth targets. This is due to the abundance of near offset data and high level of illumination compared to conventional marine seismic. A drawback of this top source solution is the lack of long offsets, which are important for deeper imaging and AVO. In this paper, we present a combined solution with both sources on top and in the front of the spread. We deploy the front sources from the vessel that also is towing the streamers, while a separate source vessel is towing the top sources. This gives an operationally efficient top-to-bottom solution to the seismic imaging and inversion problem solving both high and low targets. We will show examples of real data with up to six top sources and describe the solutions to the deblending challenges.