An application of internal multiple prediction and primary reflection retrieval to salt structures

Abstract

Irregular salt bodies complicate the seismic wavefield propagation and cause multipathing, leading to intricate internal multiples that cannot be easily suppressed during data processing. To investigate the performance of internal multiple removal in salt bodies, we compare two types of Marchenko-based internal multiple removal strategies. One focuses on internal multiple prediction (IMP) based on Marchenko redatuming and seismic interferometry. With the retrieved upgoing and downgoing Green’s functions, internal multiples can be reconstructed using convolutional interferometry. The second method emphasizes primary reflection retrieval (PRR) by capturing primary reflections without adaptive subtraction. It is derived from a modified method based on the Gel’fand-Levitan-Marchenko equation. Testing with the Pluto salt model, we find that for the IMP the critical point is obtaining the purely scattering components of the upgoing and downgoing Green’s functions from the complicated wavefield. Our complex salt model indicates that the predicted internal multiples’ adaptive subtraction also introduces an extra challenge for attenuation quality. We develop a layer-by-layer adaptive subtraction scheme for the IMP to obtain primary reflections. The constant-time truncation operator in the time domain makes the PRR independent of additional model information, which can exclude internal multiples from the primary reflections. However, selecting an appropriate smoothing window for truncation requires further investigation. We evaluate the weaknesses of these methods and enhance each method individually. Our numerical results indicate that these improved schemes can correctly handle internal multiples in salt structure scenarios. In the addition, we study the robustness of the IMP when an erroneous background velocity model is used to estimate the direct arrival and the effects of sampling on the virtual receiver/source lines in IMP.