Wavefield-separation methods for dual-sensor towed-streamer data

Abstract

A dual-sensor towed streamer records the pressure and vertical component of particle motion associated with the incident wavefield that may be used to separate the wavefield into its up- and downgoing parts. This procedure requires information about the water properties (wave-propagation velocity and density) and is robust in the presence of errors in the estimation of these quantities of the magnitude likely to be encountered. In practice, the particle motion data recorded by current towed marine streamers encounter very strong mechanical noise such that, for the lowest frequencies, the wavefield separation must be approximated by deconvolving the ghost function from the pressure data. This procedure requires information about the streamer depth and is robust to small depth errors over the frequency range for which it is required for dual-sensor streamer processing, but it is much more sensitive if applied over the bandwidth necessary to deghost pressure data acquired at a conventional streamer depth. The signal-to-noise ratio can be further enhanced by recombining the up- and downgoing pressure fields at the sea surface, which has the effect of applying a ghostlike filter to noise that is recorded by only one of the two sensors. In practical marine acquisition scenarios, spatial sampling is often insufficient to yield an accurate result, especially in the crossline direction. If each streamer is processed independently assuming that the wavefield propagation is purely inline, significant errors can be introduced. For arrivals with high emergent angles, errors may also be introduced even if the wavefield propagation actually is purely inline due to incorrect treatment of spatially aliased energy. However, these effects are almost entirely confined to very shallow events. They can be mitigated by using independently derived information about the crossline propagation angle and, for data comprising predominantly forward scattered energy, appropriate application of linear moveout.