Radial trace filtering revisited: current practice and enhancements

David C. Henley

Filtering seismic data in the radial trace (R-T) domain is an effective technique for attenuating coherent noise on ensembles of seismic traces. In some applications R-T filtering can be more effective than more established methods like K-F filtering. Operational experience with radial trace filtering over the past three years has led to the implementation of a new interpolation option in the radial trace transform and to the identification of a particular attenuation method which works well in a variety of situations. The new interpolation scheme enables more effective removal of coherent noise that is mildly spatially aliased, in some instances, while the most generally effective R-T filtering method now appears to be that of modelling the noise in the R-T domain and subtracting the modelled noise from the original data in the X-T domain. Revisiting the 1998 Shaganappi high-resolution data set illustrates the increased effectiveness of both the new interpolation technique and the noise modelling/subtraction technique. A comparison to K-F filtering on these data is also shown, in which radial trace filtering is clearly superior.