Treatment of Conflicting Dips in the 3D CRS Stack

The 3D common-reflection-surface technique (CRS) provides a stacking tool for the simulation of zero-offset sections. For that purpose, the stacking operators, which represent the kinematic reflection responses of specific reflector segments in depth, are parameterised in terms of so-called kinematic wavefield attributes. Implementations of the 3D CRS stack automatically determine the kinematic wavefield attributes by means of coherence analyzes for each ZO location to be imaged. Therefore, coherence values are computed for a set of different stacking operators and the operator and the corresponding wavefield attributes with the highest coherence value are chosen for the realization of the stack. Obviously, this technique assumes that only one reflection event contributes to a specific ZO location. As this assumption is in many cases not fulfilled the stack may show a deteriorated quality and the attributes may be fragmentary. Here, we present a method to overcome this so-called conflicting dip problem. We allow different stacking operators for each ZO location and construct the final stack as a superposition of these operators. Additionally, our approach yields coherent sets of stacking operators for each of the conflicting dips. The applicability of the method is finally demonstrated on a marine dataset.