Airwaves Prediction Model for Shallow Water Marine Control Source Electromagnetic Data

One of the main challenges of using Marine Control Source Electro-Magnetic (MCSEM) sounding for Hydrocarbon de- tection has been the airwaves phenomena. In shallow water the response from the air half-space often masks the response from the subsurface. In this paper we present a curve fitting approach to identify a mathematical function or model that best describes the pattern of the airwaves data. The identified model can serve as a prediction model for the airwaves. Synthetic data are simulated in a geologic model that is fairly representative of the area where real MCSEM data were collected. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Sum of Square Error (SSE) and Coefficient of determination (R2) were used to evaluate the performance of the prediction model. The result indicates that exponential decay function can describe the airwaves data with RMSE of 3.1e-7, SSE of 1.3e-11 and R2 of 0.990.