On a plane-wave based crosscorrelation-type seismic interferometry

Abstract

We explored a new approach to retrieve virtual seismic responses from crosscorrelating acquired seismic data in the plane-wave domain. Using this method, slant stacking is first performed over shot or receiver locations of observed seismic data to produce plane-wave transformed gathers. Crosscorrelation is then performed by selecting traces with the same ray parameters from different shot or receiver locations of the plane-wave gathers. Unlike traditional crosscorrelation-type time-space domain interferometry, where full range of ray parameters is used for each survey location, this method directly selects common ray parameters to cancel overlapping raypaths. This approach can be used to retrieve reflections in the presence of dispersive waves and to select certain ranges of ray parameters with directional wave paths for retrieval. It can avoid spurious arrivals in supervirtual interferometry when unwanted arrivals such as reflections break the requirement of conventional interferometry. In addition, computation time can be saved with this approach because plane-wave transform usually results in a reduction of the original data volume. We demonstrate this method with synthetic and ocean bottom seismometer data examples.