Active Source Data Format Standards & Futures
Stewart A. LevinConsulting Associate Faculty
Dept. Geophysics, Stanford Univ.
Differentiation
• Field recording– SEG-D (E&P seismic)– SEG-2 (Engineering seismic)
• Exchange– SEG-Y and near variants (SU)– Sometimes SEG-2 or SAC
• Processing– SAC, SU, SEP, Madagascar, commercial vendors– HDF
Status
• Field recording– SEG-D 3.0• Very comprehensive• GPS time stamps• Continuous recording
– SEG-2• Very flexible• Limited to 2 Gb per file• Microseismic community update effort(s)
Status
• Exchange– SEG-Y 1.0• Heavily (ab)used, some painful limitations• New draft version 2.0 being circulated
– supports multiple headers, long traces, header remapping, arbitrary sample interval, …
– SEG-2• No current effort to overcome 2Gb, but has been done
informally
– Various processing formats used when standards are too limiting or too complicated
Status
• Processing– No formal standards, a number of de facto options• SEG-Y flavors, SAC
– SEG has licensed HDF for use with its formats
Encapsulation
• Efficiency– Large tape records– Fixed length blocking
• Completeness– Assemble related meta-data, e.g. navigation,
observer’s notes, etc., with seismic– ZIP, tar, cpio don’t handle industry-sized seismic
files
Encapsulation
• Efficiency– SEG-D and SEG-Y have primitive blocking scheme– RODE overly complex for this purpose
• Completeness– No widely accepted options– One of the reasons SEG wants to use HDF
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