Removing abnormal environmental noise in nodal land seismic data using deep learning

Abstract

In field seismic data, abnormal environmental noise from the acquisition environment often is unavoidable, and its characteristics are complex. Abnormal environmental noise has a strong amplitude (tens of thousands times the average seismic amplitudes) and masks the effective seismic signal. The traditional method for removing such abnormal environmental noise relies on energy scanning to identify the noise location. However, energy scanning cannot always accurately identify such noise due to the sudden energy change at the locations of first-breaks and surface waves. A deep learning method for removing abnormal environmental noise has been developed. The presence of environmental noise with large amplitude also results in an uneven energy distribution. The existing denoising networks rarely consider this situation. Based on the characteristics of environmental noise received by the nodal seismic acquisition system, a workflow for automatically generating the training data sets has been established. The network is built based on the Unet with the incorporation of a residual block. The Batchnorm layer is specifically omitted to adapt to the uneven energy distribution. Synthetic and field data testing have confirmed the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method. The new method indicates better denoising performance and greater flexibility than the traditional method. Comparison between different networks also indicates that the new Residual Block Connected Unet is much more effective in denoising seismic data that contain abnormal environmental noise.