Which sensor for land nodal seismic: recording acceleration or velocity?

Land seismic is evolving towards denser surveys, single sensor recording, and lower frequencies.

With this change, a number of new nodal systems have been introduced to facilitate this evolution: some use moving coil geophones, while others use new sensors, based on MEMS or piezoelectricity, which record acceleration instead of velocity as for geophones.

This paper argues that the domain in which you record the data, acceleration or velocity does not really matter, as you can always convert the data into the domain of your choice for processing. The type of sensor used will however have an impact on the quality of the data, with accelerometers being the better choice for single sensor broadband surveys.

A technical paper published by SEG, written by STRYDE's Nicolas Goujon, Amine Ourabah, Zhongmin Song and Celina Gierz.