Some aspects on seismic processing of wide-aperture data

Abstract

Wide-aperture, migrated sections reveal interpretable events that seem very significant for petroleum exploration, but do not appear in conventional sections. Processing wide-aperture data requires special steps to handle the complexity of the data recording geometry. Multi-shots within a simulated shot gather require shot-consistent, profile-mode deconvolution. Upon understanding noise patterns, useful data fairways can be found, and the data within the fairways processed to final sections. This means that the effective fold is much lower than the original, recording fold. This is shown to be why the conventional normal moveout process works reasonably well with wide-aperture data. Wide-aperture surveys are often conducted over poor-record or no-record areas where little velocity information is available. For such a survey, one may need to perform simultaneously velocity estimation and stacking. Here, the interactive, constant-velocity stack process was used successfully, including dip moveout and migration, with the assumption of small lateral velocity variations. Lastly, wide-aperture, stacked events are argued to be geologically meaningful and useful for exploration.