A Simulation Study on Factors Affecting Airwaves Using Factorial Design

In shallow water Sea Bed Logging (SBL) survey, air layer response
from the Electro-Magnetic (EM) signals creates a disturbance known as the
source-induced airwaves. The airwaves commonly denote the energy that
propagates from the EM source via the atmosphere to the receiver on the
seabed. As a result, the airwaves dominate the measured survey data, so that
the sought-after signals from possible hydrocarbon layers in the subsurface can
be totally masked. In this study, a 5x5 factorial design is used to analyze the
effect of frequency, seawater conductivity, sediment conductivity, seawater
depth and offset on the magnitude of airwaves. The result based on F-statistics,
indicates that frequency has higher significant effect on the magnitude of the
airwaves followed by the seawater depth, offset, seawater conductivity and
sediment conductivity in that order.