Vibroseis Whitening - Past, Present and Future

The vibroseis whitening (or application of AGC to vibroseis records before their convolution with the sweep signal) was successfully tested in Russia and abroad at the end of 1980ties by a number of processing companies including GEMOI Neftegeofizika (Naro-Fominsk), KOME Ukrgeofizika (Kiev), and GlavNIVTS of the Ministry of Natural Resources of USSR (Moscow). The efficiency of vibroseis whitening was proved for traveltime processing as well as amplitude-preserving processing using both the field and synthetic data. It was shown that relative amplitudes are preserved with very high accuracy in both directions of the time section in contrast to AGC applied after the vibroseis correlation. Nevertheless, the vibroseis whitening procedure was not routinely used, and even the opportunity to apply it is not available now, since vibroseis correlation is performed directly in the field, and the correlated records only are transferred to the processing centres. In this paper we have attempted to attract attention to the efficiency of this simple procedure and described the previously obtained results as well as new modelling studies using the modern processing and interpretation systems.