Recursive Interferometric Surface-wave Suppression For Improved Reflection Imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a recursive interferometric method to effectively suppress surface waves in seismic reflection data, significantly improving the clarity of subsurface reflections for imaging and monitoring.

Contribution

It presents a novel iterative approach combining seismic interferometry and adaptive subtraction for enhanced surface-wave suppression in seismic datasets.

Findings

Significant surface wave suppression demonstrated in real seismic data.

Enhanced reflection visualization for improved subsurface imaging.

Iterative method outperforms single-step suppression techniques.

Abstract

High-resolution seismic reflections are essential for imaging and monitoring applications. In seismic land surveys using sources and receivers at the surface, surface waves often dominate, masking the reflections. In this study, we demonstrate the efficacy of a two-step procedure to suppress surface waves in an active-source reflection seismic dataset. First, we apply seismic interferometry (SI) by cross-correlation, turning receivers into virtual sources to estimate the dominant surface waves. Then, we perform adaptive subtraction to minimise the difference between the surface waves in the original data and the result of SI. We propose a new approach where the initial suppression results are used for further iterations, followed by adaptive subtraction. This technique aims to enhance the efficacy of data-driven surface-wave suppression through an iterative process. We use a 2D seismic reflection dataset from Scheemda, situated in the Groningen province of the Netherlands, to illustrate the technique's efficiency. A comparison between the data after recursive interferometric surface-wave suppression and the original data across time and frequency-wavenumber domains shows significant suppression of the surface waves, enhancing visualization of the reflections for following subsurface imaging and monitoring studies.