An amplitude-preserving deblending approach for simultaneous sources

Abstract

A goal of simultaneous shooting is to acquire high-quality seismic data more efficiently, while reducing operational costs and improving acquisition efficiency. Effective sampling and deblending techniques are essential to achieve this goal. Inspired by compressive sensing (CS), we have formulated deblending as an analysis-based sparse inversion problem. We solve the inversion problem with an algorithm derived from the classic alternating direction method (ADM), associated with variable splitting and nonmonotone line-search techniques. In our testing, the analysis-based formulation together with nonmonotone ADM algorithm provides improved performance compared with synthesis-based approaches. A major issue for all deblending approaches is how to deal with real-world variations in seismic data caused by static shifts and amplitude imbalances. We evaluate the concept of including static and amplitude corrections obtained from surface-consistent solutions into the deblending formulation. We implement solutions that use a multistage inversion scheme to overcome the practical issues embedded in the field-blended data, such as strong coherent noise, statics, and shot-amplitude variations. The combination of these techniques gives high-fidelity deblending results for marine and land data. We use two field-data examples acquired with simultaneous sources to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Imaging and amplitude variation with offset quantitative analysis are carried out to indicate the amplitude-preserving character of deblended data with this methodology.