Exploiting Free-Surface Ghosts as Mirror Observations in Marine Seismic Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a processing-based method that reinterprets free-surface ghosts in marine seismic data as mirror observations, enabling enhanced signal quality without complex inversion procedures.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that exploits the deterministic relationship between primary and ghost wavefields, improving data quality without hardware modifications.

Findings

Enhances wavelet compactness in synthetic data

Partially recovers ghost-affected frequency content

Maintains numerical stability in processing

Abstract

Free-surface ghosts in marine seismic data are traditionally treated as artifacts that degrade bandwidth and temporal resolution and are mitigated through acquisition design or inverse filtering. This study proposes a processing-driven framework that reinterprets free-surface ghosts as coherent mirror observations rather than unwanted noise. The proposed approach exploits the deterministic relationship between primary and ghost wavefields. After decomposing the recorded data into primary and ghost components, the wavefields are physically realigned through wavefield backpropagation and survey sinking and then coherently summed. This strategy enhances signal quality without explicit inversion of the ghost operator, thereby avoiding the numerical instability inherent in inverse ghost deconvolution. Synthetic examples demonstrate that the framework improves wavelet compactness and partially recovers ghost-affected frequency content while maintaining numerical stability. The method is applicable to both source- and receiver-side ghosts and does not require modification of acquisition geometry or specialized hardware, making it particularly well suited to legacy marine seismic datasets. By shifting ghost mitigation from acquisition design to post-acquisition processing, the proposed framework provides a unifying physical interpretation of free-surface ghosts and offers a flexible pathway for broadband signal enhancement and improved signal-to-noise ratio in marine seismic data, consistent with previous field-scale observations.