Archive of Digital and Digitized Analog Boomer Seismic Reflection Data Collected During USGS Cruise 96CCT02 in Copano, Corpus Christi, and Nueces Bays and Corpus Christi Bayou, Texas, July 1996

The USGS Florida Integrated Science Center (FISC) - St. Petersburg assigns a unique identifier to each cruise or field activity. For example, 96CCT02 tells us the data were collected in 1996 for the Coastal Change and Transport (CCT) study and the data were collected during the second field activity for that study in that calendar year. Refer to http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/infobank/programs/html/definition/activity.html for a detailed description of the method used to assign the cruise ID. The naming convention used for each seismic line is as follows: xxmdd_##a, where xx is an abbreviation of the geographic area where the data were collected and mdd is the month and day the trackline was collected, ## is a 2-digit number representing a specific track, and a is a letter representing the section of a line if recording was prematurely terminated or rerun for quality or acquisition problems. The boomer plate is an acoustic energy source that consists of capacitors charged to a high voltage and discharged through a transducer in the water. The transducer is towed on a sled at the sea surface and when discharged emits a short acoustic pulse, or shot, that propagates through the water and sediment column. The acoustic energy is reflected at density boundaries (such as the seafloor or sediment layers beneath the seafloor), detected by the receiver, and recorded by a PC-based seismic acquisition system. This process is repeated at timed intervals (for example, 0.5 s) and recorded for specific intervals of time (for example, 100 ms). In this way, a 2-D vertical image of the shallow geologic structure beneath the ship track is produced. An ORE GeoPulse power supply provided 105 Joules per shot. Reflected energy was received by an Innovative Transducers, Inc. (ITI) ST-5 streamer and recorded by Delph Seismic acquisition software. The streamer contains 10 hydrophones evenly spaced every 0.5 m. For lines tx710_1 through tx715_27, phones 5-8 were used, and for lines tx715_28 through tx716_44, phones 3, 4, 7, and 8 were used. The streamer had two configurations (either directly behind or beside the research vessel), both of which had it positioned parallel to the boomer sled and laterally separated from it by about 4 m. Refer to figure 1 included with this archive (Data Series 296) for a diagram of the acquisition geometries. The sample frequency of the data was 12 kHz, and record length was 100 - 150 ms. Based on survey speeds of 3.5 - 4 knots and a shot rate of every 0.25 - 0.5 s, shot spacing was about 0.5 - 1 m. The unprocessed seismic data are stored in SEG-Y, integer, Motorola format, which is a standard digital format that can be read and manipulated by most seismic processing software packages (Barry and others, 1975). The SEG-Y formatted trace files have .SEG and .TRA extensions. Additional recording parameters for each trace file can also be found in the .PAR file associated with each .TRA file. However, the .PAR files included here are needed only to process or display the data with Delph Seismic software. Also provided are example Seismic Unix scripts that allow the user to strip off navigation fixes from the SEG-Y headers, along with a fix for every 500 shots, and produce a filtered and gained GIF image of each profile.