Leveraging automation to aid time constraints on seismic data processing for offshore windfarm development

In a fast-paced environment such as the offshore wind industry, any project runs on a tight schedule, especially in the early development phase. In seismic surveys the data acquisition work rarely can be speed up, therefore, data processing becomes a potent step to look into for optimization. Hardware advancements such as fast storage solutions and parallel computing capabilities have provided a big source of optimization in the last years. Nonetheless, a lot can be gained by adapted processing solutions that are designed to efficiently answer challenges within the data. Especially the interaction and dependencies of different steps within the same workflow can make small optimizations a powerful tool. This contribution looks at different processing steps to, on the one hand see the resource gain from automated tools such as first break and velocity picking algorithms and on the other hand resource intensive methods such as prestack time migration which provide a huge increase in imaging quality. In the end the way to streamline a processing workflow either for quality or speed will depend on the requirements of the overall project.