Identification, Interpretation and Attenuation of Interbed Multiples from West Africa

Despite the advances in 2D and 3D surface multiple suppression, interpretation difficulties persist where long period interbed multiples interfere with seismic reflection data. In this paper we study interbed multiples using a 3D re-processing case history from West Africa. We address the understanding of the problem using simple ray-trace seismic modelling to generate prestack data volumes which are processed and then compared with the real data volume. The modeling confirms that non-hyperbolic multiple arrivals and subsequent imperfect removal contributes to the interpretation difficulties. Finally we attempt to suppress the modeled multiples using a new radon domain based adaptive subtraction technique.