Potential Acquisition Geometries for Pre-Salt Red Sea Seismic Exploration

The main challenges for pre-salt seismic exploration in the Red Sea are related to signal-to-noise ratio, frequency content, and subsurface illumination. It is consequently difficult to build a velocity model for reliable subsurface imaging. Accuracy of the seismic amplitudes is another issue that limits the performance of inversion and quantitative interpretation. We have conducted a finite difference modeling study to analyze the effect of multiples and conversion of P-to-S energy on signal-to-noise ratio and to evaluate subsurface illumination for wide-azimuth and full-azimuth geometries. The results of this study will be discussed in this abstract.