An analysis on the simultaneous imaging of simultaneous source data

Abstract

Simultaneous source acquisition is gaining more and more interest in the seismic industry due to the possibility of increasing acquisition efficiency and reducing cost. The simultaneous source data could be simultaneously imaged without going through the pre‐separation step. One challenge for this simultaneous imaging approach is the undesired crosstalk artifacts. Understanding the origin and nature of this type of noise is important for practical reasons. We start from the modeling and migration equations for conventionally acquired data, and by introducing the concept of “effective” source we extend these equations naturally to simultaneous source data. The crosstalk term presented in the migration equation is analyzed. Assuming the source time delay is a uniform random variable within a certain range, we show that the product of the angular frequency and the range of source time delay plays an important role in “modulating” the crosstalk noise. This might help us to gain some insights on the simultaneous‐imaging related methods. As a numerical experiment we applied the simultaneous imaging approach to a 2D synthetic simultaneous source dataset. The migration image is close to the conventional migration image.