Paper Summary

The last decade has seen considerable success toward solving long-standing exploration and reservoir characterization challenges, such as subsalt reservoir imaging. These advances have been enabled through new acquisition techniques in combination with advances in methods for processing, imaging and inversion of seismic data that is rich in low frequencies. In particular, methods such as reverse-time migration rely on highly accurate velocity models. Deriving such velocity models in turn fundamentally requires the acquisition of low-frequency seismic data. In addition, as is nicely demonstrated in one of the papers in this special section, low frequencies also benefit higher resolution images and enables deeper penetration in the subsurface. The need for extending the temporal bandwidth of seismic data has therefore become increasingly evident and is a key area for research and development both in industry and academia.