A practical procedure for application of 3D SRME to conventional marine data

Abstract

Complex 3D multiples are a pervasive problem affecting data sets from a variety of geographic areas. 3D surface-related multiple elimination (SRME) is a powerful method capable of attenuating a large class of even the most complex 3D multiples. While SRME does not make any assumptions about the subsurface and is a data-driven procedure, its 3D implementation requires dense sampling of the wavefield on the surface, amounting to the deployment of a shot and a receiver at every surface location. Typical marine acquisition geometries deliver much sparser surface coverage, which results in severe shot- and receiver-domain aliasing in the crossline direction.