A Method to Suppress Salt-related Converted Wave Using 3D Acoustic Modelling

Converted waves can be recorded in a marine environment in the presence of large velocity contrasts, like a salt body. Salt-related converted waves can significantly contaminate P-wave image. The most noteworthy converted wave recorded in a salt province is generated from the base of salt. In this paper a method has been proposed to attenuate this energy before migration to improve sub-salt imaging. A clean converted wave model is generated using 3D acoustic forward modelling. This is then adaptively subtracted from the input dataset. Application of the proposed method is demonstrated in a complex deep water salt environment data set from the Mediterranean Sea.