Polarity Blind and Polarity Sensitive Gather Flattening Methods

The need for applying gather flattening process on Multi Azimuth (MAZ) gathers where three or more narrow azimuth (NAZ) surveys were merged on the same common midpoint gather as well as the need for better alignment of noisy land data gathers created a need for stronger alignments than our current polarity blind gather flattening method provides. That is, we need to align peaks-to-peaks and troughs-to-troughs. We call this process a polarity sensitive gather flattening. This paper studies the performance of polarity sensitive gather flattening on three such surveys.