USE OF SINGLE-CHANNEL SEISMIC-REFLECTION PROFILING DATA USABLE FOR THE QUANTITATIVE DETERMINATION OF SEDIMENT PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THE SEABED AND THE LAYERED SUBBOTTOM

摘要

The present invention discloses a method for the quantitative characterisation of a seabed sediment composition and a seabed's layered subbottom structure from at least one normal-incidence, single-channel reflection acoustic amplitude time series seismogram. The method detects a plurality of reflections from subbottom interfaces in said seismograms, determines the traveltime, the polarity and the reflectivity of each detected reflection, determines the intrinsic attenuation of the sediment layer between pairs of adjacent reflections, and determines the acoustic properties, layer thicknesses and material properties of the seabed's layered subbottom structure as a function of said traveltimes, polarities and reflectivities of the detected reflections and said intrinsic attenuation of the sediment layer between pairs of adjacent reflections. The invention also discloses a forward model describing the physical relationship between the material properties and the acoustic properties of seabed sediments.