Processing Formats

There are a number of these. Seismic Unix (SU) has their format which is derived from SEGY. It is good for reflection seismic processing and is focused on vertical component geophones when it comes to headers. BSU uses what it calls BSEGY. It is very similar to SU, but headers include polarizations in 3-component directions for both sources and geophones. This is because the problems addressed by BSU include 3-components for both the source and geophone.

Both SU and BSEGY are similar to the exchange format, SEGY in that they use a 240 byte trace header followed by a data block. This way, the headers are locked to the data. Neither SU or BSEGY uses a reel header, since that goes back to the days of 9 inch tape.

BSU also supports dumping data to text and comma separated variable formats for those who just want to get the binary format out into something they can use in software like Matlab or Spread Sheets.