Seismic Oil of Olay: wrinkle reduction on 3D source ensembles

David C. Henley

We have shown in other work that interferometric principles can be used to remove effects of the near-surface layers from seismic reflection data. Our method, raypath interferometry, has been successfully applied to several 2D seismic lines, and has proven comparable or superior to conventional surface correction methods, particularly for converted wave data, or for any dataset where surface-consistency is not satisfied, or non-stationary surface correction is required. It has also been demonstrated that raypath interferometry can be applied to small 3D seismic surveys, but that the processing burden makes the approach unattractive for larger surveys.

We show here the results of experimental pre-processing, based on interferometric principles, applied to large 3D source gathers in which we attempt to remove, at least partially, the near-surface effects at the receivers within a 3D array, independently for each shot. We envision this as the possible first step of a two-part process, in which the second step removes near-surface effects between source locations prior to CMP stacking or imaging. We explore three interferometric approaches to removing near-surface effects from receiver locations within source gathers. Just as the application of Oil of Olay attempts to reduce facial wrinkles on mature adults, the application of interferometry attempts to remove the ‘wrinkles’ due to near-surface effects from reflections on 3D seismic source gathers.