Patent ID: 8605551

Claim:
A method of obtaining information about positions of seismic sources in a marine seismic source array, the method comprising: determining respective notional signatures for m selected seismic sources, wherein m<n, and n is a number of the seismic sources in the seismic source array actuated to generate an output; obtaining information about a travel time between one of the m selected seismic sources and one of n−m unselected seismic sources from the determined notional signatures, wherein obtaining information about the travel time between the one of the m selected seismic sources and the one of the n−m unselected seismic sources from the determined notional signatures comprises identifying an anomalous feature in the notional signature of the one of the m selected seismic sources and the travel time comprises a time interval between actuating the one of the n−m unselected seismic sources and generating the anomalous feature in the notional signature for the one of the m selected seismic sources; and using the travel time to determine a distance between the one of the m selected seismic sources and the one of the n−m unselected seismic sources.