Paper Summary
In the shallow water environment found in parts of the Barents Sea, conventional imaging struggles to successfully resolve the near surface. This is due to the lack of near offsets (angles) in typical marine seismic data, caused by the large minimum distance between the source and receivers. Here, we present a method that uses separated (up- and down-going) wavefields provided by dual-sensor streamer technology to construct images and image gathers that span a complete range of incidence angles. In this method, each receiver is also used as a virtual source, hence providing a dataset that has complete coverage of zero- and near-offsets everywhere under the seismic spread. In particular, this provides near-angles for shallow targets that are not sampled by primaries, enabling amplitude versus angle (AVA) analysis to be carried out. The AVA results can be used to derive a direct hydrocarbon indicator (DHI) that would otherwise be impossible to achieve using primaries alone.