AccScience Publishing / JSE / Volume 35 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026180078
ARTICLE

Shallow marine seismic inversion strategy using air-gun secondary bubble signature

Jiho Ha1 Kyoungmin Lim2 Jungkyun Shin1*
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1 Pohang Research Branch, Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, Pohang, Republic of Korea
2 Department of Energy and Resources Engineering, National Korea Maritime & Ocean University, Busan, Republic of Korea
JSE 2026, 35(4), 026180078 https://doi.org/10.36922/JSE026180078
Received: 27 April 2026 | Revised: 2 June 2026 | Accepted: 4 June 2026 | Published online: 3 July 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Seismic surveys in coastal and shallow waters have gained increasing importance due to the growing demand for marine infrastructure development, coastal ground stability assessment, and environmental monitoring. However, in coastal waters with depths of approximately 5–30 m, limitations such as restricted vessel operation, short offsets, and a lack of low-frequency components make it difficult to obtain reliable long wavelength velocity models. This study proposes a strategy to regenerate secondary bubble signals from an air-gun source—typically treated as components to be removed—as effective low-frequency information in shallow marine seismic data obtained using a portable air-gun/streamer system. Using deterministic deconvolution with the source wavelet, the primary reflections were separated from the raw data, and the residual between them was used to construct the secondary bubble–dominant dataset. The long wavelength velocity structure was then inverted using direct envelope reflection-based full waveform inversion (DE-RFWI). Application to field data acquired in the Yeongil Bay area of Pohang demonstrates that the proposed approach provides a more structurally consistent, long-wavelength velocity model compared with primary-based FWI, confirming that reliable velocity models can be obtained even under short-offset and low frequency-deficient conditions. This study offers a practical workflow that overcomes the inherent limitations of portable shallow marine seismic systems and enhances subsurface property modeling in coastal and transition zone environments.

Keywords
Shallow seismic survey
Coastal seismic survey
Secondary bubble
Low frequency
DE-RFWI
Long wavelength
Funding
This work was funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT of Korea.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest or competing interests. We certify that the submission is original work and is not under review at any other publication.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing