Wireline Sonic Waveform Data

IODP logging contractor: USIO/LDEO

Hole: U1351B

Expedition: 317

Location: Canterbury Basin (SW Pacific Ocean)

Latitude: 44° 53.0422' S

Longitude: 171° 50.406 ' E

Logging date: November 24-25, 2009

Sea floor depth (driller's): 132.7 m DRF

Sea floor depth (logger's): 134 m WRF (DIT/APS/HLDS/HNGS downlog)

Sea floor depth (logger's): 132.5 m WRF (DIT/APS/HLDS/HNGS main)

Sea floor depth (logger's): 133 m WRF (FMS/DSI/GPIT/HNGS downlog)

Total penetration: 1030.6 m DSF

Total core recovered: 304.52 m ( 29.5 % of cored section)

Oldest sediment recovered: Late Miocene

Lithologies:  mud, sandy mud, shell hash, sand, muddy sand, sand (sandstone), shell hash (limestone)

TOOL USED: DSI (Dipole Sonic Imager)

Remarks about the recording: The dipole shear sonic imager (DSI) was operated in the following modes in both passes: P&S monopole (medium frequency), upper dipole (standard frequency), and lower dipole (low frequency).

MONOPOLE P&S MODE: measures compressional and hard-rock shear slowness. The monopole transmitter is excited by a high-frequency pulse, which reproduces conditions similar to previous sonic tools.

UPPER DIPOLE MODE: measures shear wave slowness using firings of the upper dipole transmitter.

LOWER DIPOLE MODE: measures shear wave slowness using firings of the lower dipole transmitter.

Acoustic data are recorded in DLIS format. Each of the eight waveforms generally consists of 512 samples (256 in cross-dipole mode), each recorded every 10 (monopole P&S) and 40 microsec (all dipole and Stoneley modes), at depth intervals of 15.24 cm (6 inches). The original data in DLIS format is first loaded on a Sun system using GeoFrame software. The packed waveform data files are then converted into ASCII and finally binary format.

Each line is composed of the entire waveform set recorded at each depth, preceded by the depth value. In the general case of 8 receivers with 512 samples per waveform, this corresponds to 1 + 4x512 = 4097 columns. In this hole, the specifications of the files are:

Number of columns: 4097

Number of rows:  3637 (FMS/DSI/GPIT/HNGS downlog)

Number of rows:  2712 (FMS/DSI/GPIT/HNGS uplog)

All values are stored as 32 bits IEEE floating point.
Any image or signal-processing program should be able to import the files and display the data.

The following files have been loaded:

DSI from FMS/DSI/GPIT/HNGS (Downlog, pipe at 215  m WRF)

317-U1351B_ldip_d.bin:   68.62-622.70 m WRF

317-U1351B_udip_d.bin: m WRF

317-U1351B_mono_d.bin:   68.62-622.70 m WRF

DSI from FMS/DSI/GPIT/HNGS (Uplog, pipe at 215 m WRF)

317-U1351B_ldip_up.bin:   619.50-206.34 m WRF

317-U1351B_udip_up.bin: m WRF

317-U1351B_mono_up.bin:   619.50-206.34 m WRF

The sonic waveform files are not depth shifted to a reference run or to the seafloor. For depth shift to the sea floor, please refer to the DEPTH SHIFT section in the standard data processing documentation file.

NOTE: For users interested in converting the data to a format more suitable for their own purpose, a simple routine to read the binary files would include a couple of basic steps (here in old fashioned fortran 77, but would be similar in matlab or other languages):

The first step is to extract the files dimensions and specification from the header, which is the first record in each file:
  open (1, file = *.bin,access = 'direct', recl = 50) <-- NB:50 is enough to real all fields
  read (1, rec = 1)nz, ns, nrec, ntool, mode, dz, scale, dt
  close (1)

The various fields in the header are:
      - number of depths
      - number of samples per waveform and per receiver
      - number of receivers
      - tool number (0 = DSI; 1 = SonicVISION; 2 = SonicScope; 3 = Sonic Scanner; 4 = XBAT; 5 = MCS; 6 = SDT; 7 = LSS; 8 = SST; 9 = BHC; 10 = QL40; 11 = 2PSA)
      - mode (1 = Lower Dipole, 2 = Upper Dipole, 3 = Stoneley, 4 = Monopole)
      - vertical sampling interval *
      - scaling factor for depth (1.0 = meters; 0.3048 = feet) *
      - waveform sampling rate in microseconds *
All those values are stored as 4 bytes integers, except for the ones marked by an asterisk, stored as 4 bytes IEEE floating point numbers.

Then, if the number of depths, samples per waveform/receiver, and receivers are nz, ns, and nrec, respectively, a command to open the file would be:
  open (1, file = *.bin, access = 'direct', recl = 4*(1 + nrec*ns))

Finally, a generic loop to read the data and store them in an array of dimension nrec × ns × nz would be:
  do k = 1, nz
    read (1, rec = 1+k) depth(k), ((data(i,j,k), j = 1,ns), i = 1,nrec)
  enddo

Additional information about the drilling and logging operations can be found in the Operations and Downhole Measurements sections of the expedition report, Proceedings of the Integrated Drilling Program, Expedition 317.

For any question about the data or about the LogDB database, please contact LogDB support: logdb@ldeo.columbia.edu.