Rough seas and statistical deconvolution

The rough‐sea reflection‐response varies (1) along the streamer (2) from shot to shot and (3) with time along the seismic trace. The resulting error in seismic data can be important for time‐lapse imaging. One potential way of reducing the rough‐sea receiver error is to use conventional statistical deconvolution, but special care is needed in the choice of the design and application windows.

The well‐known deconvolution problem associated with the non‐whiteness of the reflection series is exacerbated by the requirement of an unusually short design window – a requirement that is imposed by the non‐stationary nature of the rough‐sea receiver wavelet. For a synthetic rough‐sea data set, with a white 1D reflection series, the design window needs to be about 1000 ms long, with an application window about 400 ms long, centred within the design window. Although such a short design window allows the deconvolution operator to follow the time‐variation of the rough‐sea wavelet, it is likely to be too short to prevent the non‐whiteness of the geology from corrupting the operator when it is used on real data.

If finely spatial‐sampled traces are available from the streamer, the design window can be extended to neighbouring traces, making use of the spatial correlations of the rough‐sea wavelet. For this ‘wave‐following’ approach to be fruitful, the wind (and hence the dominant wave direction) needs to be roughly along the line of the streamer.