= Solution
Quality is degraded by vessel and flow noise, poor receiver coupling or position uncertainty, insufficient acquisition aperture and fold, coarse sampling and <aliasing>, and inaccurate source timing. Finite source bandwidth limits <vertical seismic resolution>; shallow-water reverberations, bubble pulses, source/receiver ghosts and <seismic multiples> overlap primary reflections. In $50\ \mathrm m$ of water with sound speed about $1500\ \mathrm{m\,s^{-1}}$, the water-layer round-trip time is only about $0.067\ \mathrm s$.
<Seismic attenuation> removes high-frequency energy, geometric spreading weakens distant returns, and heterogeneous <lithology>, scattering and <seismic anisotropy> complicate travel paths and amplitudes. Incorrect <seismic velocity> models misplace reflectors during <seismic migration>; dipping structure and out-of-plane arrivals particularly challenge two-dimensional processing. Thin layers can cause wavelet interference and tuning. Finally, even noiseless data cannot recover a normal-incidence P reflection from the stipulated zero-contrast sandstone–salt boundary: that is absent signal rather than poor recording.
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