Marine seismic wavefield measurement to remove sea‐surface multiples

Abstract

We propose a new method for removing sea‐surface multiples from marine seismic reflection data in which, in essence, the reflection response of the earth, referred to a plane just above the sea‐floor, is computed as the ratio of the plane‐wave components of the upgoing wave and the downgoing wave. Using source measurements of the wavefield made during data acquisition, three problems associated with earlier work are solved: (i) the method accommodates source arrays, rather than point sources; (ii) the incident field is removed without simultaneously removing part of the scattered field; and (iii) the minimum‐energy criterion to find a wavelet is eliminated.Pressure measurements are made in a horizontal plane in the water. The source can be a conventional array of airguns, but must have both in‐line and cross‐line symmetry, and its wavefield must be measured and be repeatable from shot to shot. The problem is formulated for multiple shots in a two‐dimensional configuration for each receiver, and for multiple receivers in a two‐dimensional configuration for each shot. The scattered field is obtained from the measurements by subtracting the incident field, known from measurements at the source. The scattered field response to a single incident plane wave at a single receiver is obtained by transforming the common‐receiver gather to the frequency–wavenumber domain, and a single component of this response is obtained by Fourier transforming over all receiver coordinates. Each scattered field component is separated into an upgoing wave and a downgoing wave using the zero‐pressure condition at the water‐surface. The upgoing wave may then be expressed as a reflection coefficient multiplied by the incident downgoing wave plus a sum of scattered downgoing plane waves, each multiplied by the corresponding reflection coefficient. Keeping the upgoing scattered wave fixed, and using all possible incident plane waves for a given frequency, yields a set of linear simultaneous equations for the reflection coefficients which are solved for each plane wave and for each frequency. To create the shot records that would have been measured if the sea‐surface had been absent, each reflection coefficient is multiplied by complex amplitude and phase factors, for source and receiver terms, before the five‐dimensional Fourier transformation back to the space–time domain.