Removal of scattered surface waves using multicomponent seismic data

Abstract

In many exploration areas, the shallow subsurface is strongly heterogeneous. The heterogeneities can give rise to scattering of surface waves. These scattered waves can depreciate the quality of land seismic data when they mask the body‐wave reflections from the deeper part of the subsurface. Surface waves scattered near a line of receivers (inline‐scattered waves) can be removed by well‐known filtering techniques (see e.g., Yilmaz, 1987, section 1.6.2). However, surface waves scattered far from the receiver line (crossline‐scattered waves) are left intact partially by filtering because these waves can resemble body‐wave reflections. In previous papers, we have discussed an inverse scattering method for removing scattered surface waves from simulated data (Blonk and Herman, 1994), as well as from field data (Blonk et al., 1995). So far, we have limited our attention to the vertical components of the particle velocity which implies that surface waves and body‐wave reflections can be distinguished on the basis of their respective differences in phase velocity.