A New Way of Compensating for Water Column Variation by Velocity Estimation of Sea Layer

Compensating for water velocity variations remains a key challenge in seismic data processing, where the water velocity varies over time. In a 3D seismic survey, adjacent sail lines are recorded at different times, and subsequently the recorded wave-field will be different. To take this effect into account at the seismic processing stage, it is necessary to estimate the water velocity. This paper proposes a new method of estimating the water velocity that can be used to compensate for the effect of water velocity variation using a novel water layer replacement method. When the water bottom becomes more complex, the established techniques underperform as they rely upon accurate water bottom model. In this paper it is demonstrated that the correct approach is to estimate the water layer velocity in migrated space. The method is also desirable for 4D processing and projects requiring merging of multiple datasets from many different vintages.