Imaging of Blended VSP Data Using Full Wavefield Migration in the Common-receiver Domain

Abstract

Summary Blended source and/or simultaneous source acquisition in both surface and borehole seismic exploration has been a subject of interest to the oil and gas industry recently. The simultaneous or blended source acquisition, especially for large VSP surveys, can prove significantly beneficial in terms of cost efficiency. Henceforth, the subject of imaging and inversion of blended data is also an important area of research and development. In this paper, for imaging blended Vertical Seismic Profiling (VSP) data, we propose the Full Wavefield Migration (FWM) approach, which does not require an active deblending as a processing step. The FWM algorithm is performed in the common-receiver domain and is formulated in terms of a constrained least-squares inversion scheme. The inversion scheme enables to explain the subsurface reflectivity, where the incident wavefield contains all multiples and which may also be blended. We will illustrate the imaging of blended VSP data using relatively simple synthetic examples. The constrained inversion helps to reduce the crosstalk noise in the image obtained, due to wavefield interference in blending with high blending factors.