Common reflection surface (CRS) based pre-stack diffraction separation

Abstract

Summary Partial CRS stacking is a robust technique in seismic data processing for pre-stack data enhancement and trace interpolation. In this work, we modify the partial CRS stack in order to separate diffracted energy from reflections before stacking. Performing the separation prior to stacking permits not only the generation of diffraction only gathers, it also leads to better recognition of diffractions and facilitates the building of velocity models for migration operators. We propose a new work-flow entirely based on partial CRS to stack every sample of a diffraction event within an aperture expanded in offset and midpoint directions. We show that for synthetic Sigsbee 2A dataset as well as a real data this new workflow can be used to effectively separate reflected and diffracted energy in the pre-stack domain.