Research article: Combining seismic surveys to improve data quality

As is well known, seismic data contain a mixture of signal and noise (Sheriff 1978). A seismic signal refers to reflections from interfaces in the subsurface, where as noise is anything that obscures the signal. The noise can be separated into coherent and random noise and may have many different sources (Sheriff 1977; Yilmaz 1987). Coherent noise may result from effects such as cable noise, sea state noise, side-scattered noise, waterborn diffractions, propeller noise, acquisition geometry, multiples and peg legs (Yilmaz 1987).