Low frequency performance of Piezoelectric Accelerometer nodes versus geophone arrays

How do piezoelectric accelerometer nodes compare with conventional geophone arrays—particularly at the low frequencies that matter for advanced seismic imaging?

Developed by Saudi Aramco and STRYDE, this presentation examines data from a large-scale field trial in which individual piezoelectric accelerometer nodes were collocated with the geophones in a conventional nine-sensor array. The study compares raw and processed shot gathers, frequency panels and time slices across the full recorded bandwidth, including challenging sand-dune conditions.

The results show that a nine-node digital array can deliver performance comparable to a traditional geophone array after sensor-response correction, while producing cleaner signals in the critical 1–2 Hz range. The presentation also explores the value of retaining each node as an individual trace, enabling dense spatial sampling, trace-level preprocessing and more flexible workflows for applications such as full-waveform inversion.