Source Arrays and Directivity

It is common for marine seismic sources to be deployed in groups or arrays. This is done for a variety of reasons. The most obvious of these is simply to increase the power of the source. The alternative of using increasingly larger sources is impractical because size increases of a single source are inevitably accompanied by changes in the characteristics (e.g. bandwidth) of the emitted pulse. In essence, therefore, a source system of ‘n’ times the power of a single source can be achieved by firing ‘n’ sources together as an array, whilst maintaining the basic pulse characteristics of the single source.