Estimation and Application of Full Waveform Redatuming Operators

Seismic data quality can be severely affected by near-surface anomalies. The imprint of a complex near-surface can be removed by redatuming the data to a level below which the subsurface is assumed to be relatively simple. It has been shown that this can be achieved by using focusing operators that are estimated along a user-defined horizon below the near surface complexities. In the current implementation of the CFP-technology, the estimation of the focusing operators is done in terms of traveltimes only, based on a high-frequency approximation. The accompanying amplitudes are usually derived from a local homogeneous medium, which is obviously a simplification of reality. The parameterization of focusing operators in terms of traveltimes and simple amplitudes has produced encouraging results in the past, but cannot remove the near-surface complexities completely, leaving artifacts in the redatumed results. In this paper we propose a method that estimates the focusing operators in a full waveform manner, such that detailed amplitude and phase variations are included. Based on 2D synthetic data it is demonstrated that the resulting redatuming quality is improved and artifacts are reduced.