A direct noise attenuation approach in processing of land continuous records

Abstract

Blended source acquisition has drawn great attention in industry due to its increased efficiency and reduced overall cost for acquiring seismic data. It eliminates the requirement of a minimum time (usually determined by record length) between adjacent shots and allows multiple sources to be activated simultaneously and independently. Conventional processing simply converts continuous records into fixed-length records using the source excitation time and then applies traditional denoising techniques to the fixed-length records. Source excitation time is used to extract fixed-length records that are the equivalent of traditional synchronous recording. Here, we elaborate on the usage of continuous records for land noise attenuation. Compared to conventional common shot/receiver/midpoint/offset domains, continuous records represent the data in the naturally recorded domain. This domain offers flexible and much longer record lengths to work with and, moreover, enables exploiting the characteristics of noise prior to correlation, shot slicing, or other preprocessing. We limit our discussions to the techniques and methods for attenuating coherent environmental and source-generated noise on vibroseis data. We have found that incoherent noise can be handled effectively by traditional noise suppression methods after deblending. We illustrate the effectiveness of noise attenuation in the continuously recorded domain for three different types of noise using field examples from the North Slope of Alaska and the Permian Basin.