An inversion approach to separating sources in marine simultaneous shooting acquisition – application to a Gulf of Mexico data set

Abstract

The simultaneous firing of marine sources can provide a significant uplift in terms of acquisition efficiency and data quality enhancement. However, the seismic interference resulting from one or more ‘other’ sources needs to be well understood and the appropriate processing strategies need to be developed for the method to fulfil its promise. In this paper, a modified inversion approach is presented for the effective separation of sources in marine simultaneous shooting acquisition. The method aims to distribute all energy in the simultaneous shot records by reconstructing the individual shot records at their respective locations. The method is applied to a wide azimuth data set acquired in the Gulf of Mexico where two sources out of four in total were fired simultaneously. Results demonstrate that the individual sources can be separated satisfactory, both at the prestack and post‐stack level.

Iterative deblending of simultaneous-source seismic data using seislet-domain shaping regularization

“…We also thank S. Kaplan, C. Li, J. Cheng, J. Shragge, E. Slob, and one anonymous reviewer for their constructive suggestions, which helped to improve this paper. Fomel (2006) and Fomel and Liu (2010) propose a digital wavelet like transform, which is defined with the help of the wavelet-lifting scheme (Sweldens, 1995) combined with local PWD. The wavelet lifting uses predictability of even traces from odd traces of 2D seismic data and finds a difference r between them, which can be expressed as r ¼ o − P½e;…”

“…The regularization term can be chosen as a sparsity promotion in a sparsifying transformed domain (Abma et al, 2010). Van Borselen et al (2012) proposed to distribute all energy in the shot records by reconstructing individual shot records at their respective locations. Mahdad et al (2011) introduced an iterative estimation and subtraction scheme that combines the properties of filtering and inversion methods and exploits the fact that the characteristics of the blending noise differ in different domains.…”

Simultaneous long offset (SLO) towed streamer seismic acquisition

“…Continuous long offset (CLO) acquisition combines a dualvessel operation using only short streamers with a smart recording technique involving overlapping records (van Mastrigt et al, 2002). The dual-boat operation effectively doubles the streamer length, thus obtaining very long offset ranges.…”

A periodically varying code for improving deblending of simultaneous sources in marine acquisition

“…Most of the successful regularizations (Akerberg et al, 2008;Abma et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2014a;Cheng and Sacchi, 2015) are based on the sparsity constraint in some sparse transform domains. Compared with the filtering methods, deblending via inversion methods usually leads to better separation results (van Borselen et al, 2012).…”