Marine vertical cable seismic (VCS) is a promising survey technique for submarine complex structure imaging and reservoir monitoring, which uses vertical arrays of hydrophones deployed near the seafloor to record seismic wavefields in a quiet environment. Recently, we developed a new type of distributed VCS system for exploration and development of natural gas hydrates preserved in shallow sediments under the seafloor. Using this system and air-gun sources, we accomplished a 3D VCS yield data acquisition for gas hydrates exploration in the Shenhu area, South China Sea. In view of the characteristics of VCS geometry, we implement reverse time migration (RTM) on a common receiver gather to obtain high-resolution images of marine sediments. Due to the unique acquisition method, it is asymmetrical for the reflection path between the sources and the receivers in the VCS survey. Therefore, we apply accurate velocity analysis to common scatter point (CSP) gathers generated from common receiver gathers instead of the conventional velocity analysis based on common depth point gathers. RTM with this reliable velocity model results in high-resolution images of submarine hydrate-bearing sediments in deep water conditions. The RTM imaging section clearly shows the bottom simulating reflector (BSR) and also the reflection characteristics of the hydrate-bearing sediments filled with consolidated hydrates. Moreover, its resolution is relative to that of acoustic logging curves from the nearby borehole, and this imaging section is well consistent with the synthetic seismogram trace generated by the logging data. All these results reveal that VCS is a great potential technology for exploration and production of marine natural gas hydrates.

Marine vertical cable seismic (VCS) collects seismic waves by hydrophone array vertically suspended in seawater to prospect the offshore geological structure and monitor the reservoir. Due to its irregular source-receiver geometry, the primary imaging has narrow illustration coverage. Here, we proposed a cross-correlation transformation based on ghost wave interferometry. This method can transform the ghost reflections from the vertical cable seismic profile into the virtual surface seismic primaries just like those excited by the source and recorded by marine seismic towed-streamer below sea surface. After processing these virtual primaries with conventional method, we can obtain the ghost reflection imaging section with high resolution which effectively extend the illustration footprints in the subsurface. By application of this transform, virtual primaries are generated from the first-order ghost reflections of the actual VCS data. Then, migration of these virtual primaries provides a high-resolution image of hydrate-bearing sediments.

By anchoring vertical cable in seawater and receiving the data excited by the towing cable seismic source, the reflection data from subsurface structures with a high signal-to-noise ratio, wide frequency band, and wide azimuth angle can be obtained, thereby achieving high-quality imaging of the target area. However, due to drifting receivers driven by ocean currents and the nonuniform coverage caused by the vertical orientation of the receivers, the traditional imaging method cannot be directly used in the vertical cable seismic data. Furthermore, crosstalk between the primaries and multiples commonly contaminates the final imaging. A new inversion method, based on the Bayesian inference and the assumption that all errors are Gaussian distributed, is presented to address these problems. The direct waves are used to invert the source/receiver locations. The primary and multiple wavefields are accurately reconstructed based on the reconstructed direct wavefield, and the corresponding reflectivity updates are obtained. The model-domain Hessian matrices consisting of different data are approximated by their diagonal elements to mitigate the nonuniform coverage issue, and the related covariance matrices and data-domain Hessian matrices are defined and approximated, respectively, to alleviate the calculation problem. In addition, the zero-lag correlated wavefields in the gradient are consistent with the actual wavefield propagation process, e.g., a primary wave is generated when the direct wavefield encounters reflectivity, avoiding the crosstalk. Numerical examples for synthetic models and field data illustrate that our method can accurately recover the source/receiver locations and provide high-resolution balanced-amplitude imaging results without evident crosstalk.