Single-station SVD-based Polarization Filtering of Ground Roll - Investigation of Limitations and Pitfalls

In conventional seismic surveys, ground roll is an unwanted phenomenon constituting a large part of the radiation of seismic sources operating at the surface. Typically, it covers large parts of seismic records, dominating them and, therefore, masking underlying useful reflections. With the appearance of multicomponent geophones, the major efforts to eliminate the ground roll moved from the field operations to the processing stage and were laid on robust up-to-date techniques, polarization filters being the most popular. The objective of the present research efforts is to investigate theoretically and with a rather realistic 2.5D 3C synthetic data set the performance of the single-station SVD-based technique first developed by Jin and Ronen (2005) or, more specifically, to estimate the damage to the underlying reflections that can be caused by the polarization filter when subtracting the ground roll. The results obtained allow us to formulate when the ability of single-station SVD-based polarization filtering to subtract effectively the ground roll may permit the geophysicist to shut his eyes to the inevitable harm that is done by this type of filtering to the underlying reflected waves.