Sparse Inversion of Simultaneous Sources

Noise caused by the interference of seismic sources in simultaneous shooting is a barrier to the acceptance of this type of seismic acquisition. This paper presents a method that produces pre-stack data from blended acquisition data that are comparable to data from conventional acquisition. While filtering interference noise from the shots and the subsequent stacking of the data are effective in attenuating the interference on high fold wide azimuth ISS(TM) surveys, a high-quality separation of the interference from the pre-stack data would make the data more suitable for amplitude dependent analysis such as amplitude-versus-offset, time-lapse measurements and fracture detection. The high quality interference attenuation method presented here is achieved by using a sparse inversion process that solves a modified version of Berkhout’s matrix system, accurately separating source responses for good quality amplitude measurements. This produces seismic records in which the interference is attenuated to the point that it is well below the background noise. The success of this source separation step in the data processing of blended simultaneous source acquisition therefore further improves the data quality while retaining the lower cost and higher productivity of ISS(TM) acquisition compared with conventional acquisition.