Bin spacing in land 3-D seismic surveys and horizontal resolution in time slices

The cost of a land 3-D seismic survey is strongly influenced by the specified bin size. Halving the bin size will quadruple the number of stacked traces (assuming square bins), so there is considerable economic incentive to make the bins as large as possible. From an interpretive perspective, however, there are several disadvantages to 3-D data acquired with excessively large bin spacing. We investigate the constraints on bin size analytically, and then provide an experimental demonstration.