Raypath interferometry for dummies: a processing guide

David C. Henley

The near-surface layer of the earth often causes serious degradation of seismic reflection images due to the irregularity of its thickness and composition. The effects include loss of signal bandwidth as well as phase/timing mismatch of specific reflection events between seismic traces recorded at neighbouring shot or receiver surface stations. In earlier work we have introduced interferometric methods to remove these effects, and have shown that what we term the `raypath domain' is an effective one in which to work. We have demonstrated the methods on both synthetic and real data, but have not described the details. In this work, we present specific processing flows from the ProMAX processing environment and describe in detail how to apply raypath interferometry to a 2D seismic line.