Perturbation analysis of an explicit wavefield separation scheme for P‐ and S‐waves

Abstract

Dense spatial recording patterns of three‐component (3C) receivers allow for direct wavefield decomposition through explicit calculation of divergence and curl of the recorded elastic wavefield. Since this approach is based upon the observation of small phase shifts, it requires highly accurate deployment of the receiver configurations. To study the feasibility of a recently proposed P/S‐wave separation scheme, we systematically assess the effects of position and orientation errors of one or several geophones within the recording pattern on technique performance. We find that realistic deployment errors can significantly affect estimates of the divergence and curl of particle velocity. The errors induced by mispositioned or misoriented geophones differ for each of the geophones that make up a pattern. Moreover, the inaccuracies vary with the angle of incidence, potentially affecting analysis procedures applied to the data at a later stage, such as amplitude variation with offset (AVO). Based on a relative L1‐criterion, the position of each receiver needs to be accurate within 10% of the length of the sides of the configuration to obtain meaningful divergence and curl estimates. Furthermore, the output is particularly sensitive to misorientations of geophones, requiring that the orientations of all geophones be accurate within 2°. These observations point to significant difficulties when applying this technique. To alleviate this problem, we present an approach to detect and compensate for such deployment‐related inaccuracies prior to explicit P/S‐wave separation. This strategy is based on a pyramid‐shaped receiver configuration and relies on minimizing the differences between the divergence and curl estimates calculated over the pyramid and each of the four subtetrahedra that comprise the pyramid.