In the mid-1980s, Dr. Oz Yilmaz did research and taught seismic data processing at Western Geophysical, at the time a division of Litton Industries, but originally founded in 1933 by Henry Salvatori. During his teaching, Dr. Yilmaz often used 40 shot gathers that had been collected in seismic surveys around the world. Around the time Dr. Yilmaz wrote his 1987 book, "Seismic Data Processing" for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), the company kindly made the 40 shot gathers available to the public.
Record Number |
Area | Number of Samples per Trace1 |
Number of Traces1 |
Sampling Interval, ms |
Trace Interval, F or M |
Inner Offset, F or M |
Source | Split-spread (SS), Off-end near (OEN), Off-end far (OEF)4 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | South Texas | (1275) 1275 | 48 | 4 | 330 F | 990 F | Vibroseis * | SS |
22 | West Texas | (1025) 1000 | 120 | 4 | 100 F | 400 F | Vibroseis | SS5 |
3 ** | Louisiana | (1500) 1500 | 24 | 4 | 340 F | 340 F | Dynamite | OEN |
42 | Turkey | (1275) 1250 | 48 | 4 | 100 M | 250 M | Vibroseis | SS |
5 | South America | (3000) 2535 | 48 | 2 | 100 M | 200 M | Dynamite | SS |
6 | Far East | (1250) 1250 | 48 | 4 | 100 M | 150 M | Dynamite | OEF |
7 | South America | (2600) 2535 | 48 | 2 | 100 M | 300 M | Vibroseis | SS |
8 | Central America | (1300) 1281 | 96 | 4 | 50 M | 100 M | Dynamite | SS5 |
92 | Alaska | (1000) 1000 | 96 | 4 | 220 F | 990 F | Vibroseis | SS |
10 | North Africa | (1325) 1325 | (120) 78 | 4 | 25 M | 300 M | Vibroseis | OEN |
112 | Alaska | (1000) 975 | 96 | 4 | 220 F | 990 F | Vibroseis | SS |
122 | Mississippi | (1275) 1250 | (48) 483 | 4 | 330 F | 990 F | Vibroseis | SS |
13 | Offshore Offshore | (2025) 2025 | 48 | 4 | 220 F | 875 F | Air gun | OEF |
14 | Offshore Texas | (1525) 1525 | 48 | 4 | 220 F | 690 F | Aquapulse | OEF |
15 | Offshore Canada | (2500) 2500 | 48 | 2 | 25 M | 360 M | Air gun | OEF |
16 | South America | (1275) 1275 | 48 | 4 | 25 M | 233 M | Air gun | OEF |
17 | South America | (2000) 2000 | 48 | 4 | 50 M | 250 M | Air gun | OEF |
18 | Offshore Louisiana | (1500) 1500 | 120 | 4 | 82 F | 716 F | Air gun | OEF |
19 | Turkey | (1250) 1250 | 216 | 4 | 10 M | 50 M | Dynamite | OEN |
20 | South Aleutians | (2025) 2025 | 120 | 4 | 82 F | 921 F | Air gun | OEF |
212 | Denver Basin | (1550) 1500 | 48 | 2 | 220 F | 220 F | Vibroseis | SS |
222 | Williston Basin | (1550) 1500 | 48 | 2 | 110 F | 110 F | Vibroseis | OEF |
232 | San Juaquin | (1550) 1500 | 48 | 2 | 220 F | 220 F | Vibroseis | OEF |
24 | Arctic | (3000) 2535 | 48 | 2 | 220 F | 220 F | Aquaflex | SS |
25 | Alberta | (2000) 2000 | 96 | 2 | 50 M | 50 M | Dynamite | SS |
26 | Alberta | (1500) 1500 | 48 | 2 | 67 M | 67 M | Dynamite | SS |
27 | Canada | (1791) 1791 | 92 | 4 | 50 M (1-28) | 200 M | Air gun | OEF |
25 M (29-92) | ||||||||
28 | Canada | (2500) 2500 | 48 | 2 | 25 M | 300 M | Air gun | OEF |
29 | Offshore Spain | (2000) 1697 | 48 | 4 | 50 M | 250 M | Maxipulse | OEF |
30 | Offshore Crete | (2125) 2048 | 96 | 4 | 25 M | 230 M | Air gun | OEF |
31 | North Sea | (1550) 1536 | 96 | 4 | 25 M | 228 M | Air gun | OEF |
32 | North Sea | (1550) 1550 | 96 | 4 | 25 M | 178 M | Air gun | OEF |
33 | North Sea | (1625) 1536 | 96 | 4 | 25 M | 200 M | Air gun | OEF |
34 | Celtic Sea | (1500) 1485 | 60 | 4 | 50 M | 253 M | Air gun | OEN |
35 | Denmark | (2500) 2500 | 52 | 2 | 100 M | 100 M | Dynamite | SS |
362 | Middle East | (1024) 999 | 48 | 4 | 50 M | 250 M | Vibroseis | OEF |
372 | Turkey | (1000) 975 | 48 | 4 | 75 M | 187 M | Vibroseis | OEN |
38 | North Africa | (2500) 2500 | 60 | 2 | 100 M | 100 M | Vibroseis | SS |
39 | Middle East | (2500) 2500 | 60 | 2 | 50 M | 100 M | Geoflex | OEN |
40 | West Africa | (2600) 2535 | 96 | 2 | 30 M | 120 M | Dynamite | OEN |
* All vibroseis records have been correlated.
** Analog recording.
1 The value in parentheses is the value in the book; the value not in parentheses is the actual gather value.
2 Traces in these gathers have negative time samples; that is, SU keys delrt (bytes 109-110)
and muts (bytes 111-112) are negative. For all gathers except 9, I removed the negative time samples.
Gather 9 seems to have valid values before zero, so I shifted those values to positive time.
3 I found gather 12 to have 49 traces. I removed trace 49.
4 OEN means trace 1 is the nearest offset, OEF means trace 1 is the farthest offset.
5 These gathers are asymmetric split-spread.
The Seismic Unix and SEG-Y tar files that are available below (click an image) are edited from the original archived seismic unix forty shot gathers that are on the Seismic Unix wiki. The two tar files below are edited in the following ways:
Click the image below to download a compressed tar file of my edited 40 Oz shot gathers (16 Mb) in Seismic Unix "little endian" format.
Click the image below to download a compressed tar file of my edited 40 Oz shot gathers (16 Mb) in SEG-Y "little endian" format.
Madagascar Users: Professor Sergey Fomel at The University of Texas at Austin created a Madagascar script for converting the SEG-Y files to RSF. The script is on github.
For the archive shot gathers in Seismic Unix "big endian" format, go to the Seismic Unix Wiki.
Click here to download a compressed tar file of images of the 40 Oz shot gathers (2.3 Mb)
To uncompress a .tgz file, use the following command
$ tar -xvzf data.tgz
The dollar sign ($) is the command line prompt, not part of the command.
Big endian and little endian refer to byte order. For one technical description I refer you to a Wikipedia page: Endianness.
The difference between whether your installation of Seismic Unix will use big endian or little endian seismic data is how "XDR" is set in your Makefile.config file.
When you install Seismic Unix, when you run
$ make install
$ make xtinstall
and other "make" commands like these, these commands use the Makefile.config file.
For big endian configuration, use the XDR line as it appears in Makefile.config:
XDRFLAG = -DSUXDR
However, I want a little endian configuration. So, before I ran the "make" commands, I commented out the XDR line by putting the hash (#) sign at the beginning of that line. Then I added the next line that has "XDRFLAG" on the left side of the equal sign and a space on the right side of the equal sign:
#XDRFLAG = -DSUXDR
XDRFLAG =
How important is this? What is the data significance of big endian compared to little endian? At the beginning of the Makefile.config file, there is a comment that describes what it means to use XDR:
"forces all SU data to be big endian
independent of processor architecture"
Some years back, most computers were big endian; for example, computers made by Solaris and the IBM 360. However, personal computers that are x86 and AMD64 architecture are, natively, little endian. For my Seismic Unix installation on my Windows Surface Pro 3 OS, I commented out the XDR line in Makefile.config to let my SU datasets be created in the native little endian format. If you are using an x86 or AMD64 architecture, it is my opinion that you do the same.
As I described above, you can choose whether the seismic data you create on your OS will be big endian or little. By default (if you do not comment out the XDR line in your Makefile.config file), your Linux data architecture will be big endian.
Can you use little endian datasets on a big endian OS? Can you use big endian datasets on a little endian OS?
Yes, you can, but you will have to use suswapbytes on the data file before you can process the file in Seismic Unix.
How will you know you have an "endian" problem? Typically, I find this out when I use surange on a data file. I use surange a lot.
My typed command is below. Under that is the computer response.
$ surange < oz.25.su
surange: fgettr.c: on trace #2 number of samples in header (4325) differs from
number for first trace (13320)
That response does not make a lot of sense, but it is the normal Seismic Unix response to a mis-matched byte order data file.
Below, I use suswapbytes to create a new data file, then I use surange.
$ suswapbytes < oz.25.su > ozle25.su
$ surange < ozle25.su
96 traces
tracl
1 96 (1 - 96)
tracr
1 96 (1 - 96)
fldr
10025
tracf
1 96 (1 - 96)
cdp
25 120 (25 - 120)
cdpt
1
trid
1
nvs
1
nhs
1
duse
1
scalel
1
scalco
1
counit
1
delrt
2
muts
2
ns
2100
dt
2000
Now I have a successful output from surange. The endianness of my data file has been corrected for my machine by suswapbytes.