A new method based on the surface consistence for picking the first arrival time of the seismic data

Abstract

First arrival is important for processing seismic prospecting data, however, picking first arrival is a time consuming step. Various automatic first break picking methods, such as based on the wavelet energy differences, crosscorrelation technique, fractal dimension or neural network, are influenced by environmental noises because they rarely took the source-receiver geometrical relationship and surface-consistence into account. In this paper, a promising automatic first break detection method based on the acquisition geometry characters and seismic wave transmitting is presented. This method can acquire more accuracy travel times according to the statistical characteristics and surface-consistent characteristics of first arrival times within the common source gather and the common receiver gather, while the first kick time of every single trace can be estimated by the conventional methods.