f Surface-related multiple elimination and wavelet estimation

The earth's surface is the main multiple generator. In the method described in this paper the influence of the (perfectly) reflecting free surface is removed from the seismic data by an inversion proces. A significant advantage of this method is the fact that no information about the subsurface need be specified. The seismic data itself is used as the multiple prediction operator. Therefore all propagation and reflection effects of the subsurface are automatically taken into account. On the other hand a source wavelet is needed to make a proper prediction of the multiples. By applying the method adaptively this problem can be solved. Hence, application of the surface-related multiple elimination method yields an estimate of the source wavelet as well. In addition the multiple free output is perfectly scaled.