An approach to optimize the multiple contribution gather aperture

Abstract

To predict the multiples of a given trace, theoretically the wave-theory-based surface related multiple elimination technique requires all the traces in both the common shot gather and the common receiver gather corresponding to the given trace. However, according to Snell's law and ray theory it is not necessary to use all the traces, or the whole multiple contribution gather to predict multiples. That means it is necessary to optimize the multiple contribution gather aperture. Unfortunately, in practice, it is difficult to give an optimal multiple contribution gather aperture in terms of the simple formula and available parameters. In this paper, we present two simple formulae to determine the 2D optimal multiple contribution gather aperture by introducing the surface Fresnel zones of the water bottom reflection and diffraction multiples. A synthetic data example shows that the computational cost and the required computer memory to predict multiples can be significantly reduced with the proposed formulae.