Reconstruction of S-waves from low-cost randomized and simultaneous acquisition by joint sparse inversion

Abstract

Spatial Nyquist sampling rate, which is proportional to the apparent subsurface velocity, is the key deciding cost factor for conventional seismic acquisition. Due to the lower shear wave velocity compared with compressional waves, finer spatial sampling is required to properly record the earlier, which increases the acquisition costs. This is one of the reasons why shear waves are usually not considered in practice. To avoid having the Nyquist criterion as the deciding cost factor and to utilize multicomponent data to its available full extent, we propose acquiring randomly undersampled ocean bottom seismic data. Each component can then be interpolated separately, followed by elastic decomposition to recover up-and down-going S-waves. Instead, we jointly interpolate and decompose the recorded multicomponent data by solving one sparsity promoting optimization problem. This way we ensure that the relative amplitudes of the multicomponent data is preserved. We compare two sparsifying transforms: the curvelet transform and the frequency-wavenumber transform. Another key cost deciding factor for seismic acquisition is the efficiency of acquiring data. This calls for simultaneous acquisition, which requires a source separation step. Similarly, instead of taking a two-step approach, we perform a sparsity-promoting joint source separation decomposition. Results on economically and efficiently acquired synthetic data of both joint methods show their ability of reconstructing accurate up-and down-going S-waves.