Single source vs. dual source in marine acquisition: is single source really needed?

Single-source marine acquisition is considered superior from a geophysical point of view to dual-source marine acquisition. The main benefits of single-source acquisition are related to a better wavefield sampling and higher fold in the CMP domain. The marine processing sequence, based on CMP staking followed by zero-offset poststack migration, could produce superior results if the seismic data were acquired with a single source. At this time, seismic data is exclusively processed with full prestack time or prestack depth migration and 3D SRME is becoming part of the regular processing sequence. In this paper, we introduce the concept of prestack migration fold – PSMF and we show how this could affect the marine survey design.