Low-frequency seismic deghosting

Abstract

We evaluated a solution to seismic deghosting that deghosts the low-frequency components of the seismic pressure data. In an approximation that neglected the dependence on wavenumbers, the low-frequency deghosted pressure field was computed trace-by-trace as the sum of the pressure field and its scaled temporally integrated and temporally differentiated fields. We gave simple numerical examples that demonstrated the concept. The method was found to deghost data up to a frequency that is typically half of the second notch frequency. On the low-frequency side, the deghosting method was limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The low-frequency deghosting technique can be appropriate to apply to the part of seismic data that have penetrated and reflected beneath complex and attenuating overburdens such as basalt, salt, and chalk.