f VSP-based surface-seismic multiple suppression

A common problem associated with the analysis and interpretation of North Sea surface-seismic data, is the ambiguity and confusion caused by residual multiple energy in the final processed section. The source of this problem is the inability of conventional processing to adequately suppress the long-path seismic multiple wavetrains. Conventional processing can be viewed as a hybrid of two methods: NMO-stack and statistical deconvolution. On the face of it, the two methods are complementary; one suppressing low velocity multiples, and the other suppressing high velocity multiples. In practice it does not turn out this way; the statistics of deconvolution will not permit the design of an inverse operator long enough to suppress all the multiplee which survive the stack. That is, long-path multiple activity remains in the data.