Processing Variable-depth Streamer Data - First Attempt

Variable-depth streamer acquisition is emerging as a key technique for providing wide bandwidth seismic data. With several data sets acquired across the world, it has consistently produced high quality images in terms of seismic resolution, structure stratigraphy and low-frequency penetration. This is demonstrated through three data examples in this paper. The variation receiver depth introduces receiver ghost diversity across different offsets. Such diversity enables the joint deconvolution method to fully remove the receiver ghost. This kind of data also tends to be less noisy due to the deep tow of the cable. These two factors allow variable-depth streamer data to have a spectrum from 2.5 Hz up to the source notch. A key challenge in processing is how to optimize the de-multiple step. SRME, for example, can be difficult to apply because of variation of the receiver ghost. This problem can be handled by adjusting the model wavelet in the common offset domain.