Surface-Related Multiple Elimination – Applications to an offshore Australia data set

Abstract

The presence of free-surface-related wave phenomena is a classic problem in marine seismic data processing. Over the years, the industry has relied heavily on conventional multiple suppression methods such as predictive deconvolution and differential move-out filtering to remove surface-related multiples from marine seismic data. These methods are based on rather specific assumptions about the subsurface and characteristic differences between primaries and multiples. Since these assumptions are often not met in the field, the effectiveness of these methods may be limited. Surface-Related Multiple Elimination (SRME) is a relatively new method that removes all surface-related multiples,without using any additional information about the subsurface. Application of SRME to offshore Australia data sets results in much improved results, where relatively weak primary reflections become more interpretable.