Paper Summary
In the shallow water environment found in parts of the Barents Sea, conventional imaging struggles to provide good imaging of 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 full range of incidence angles. In this method, each receiver is used as a virtual source, providing a dataset that has complete coverage of zero- and near-offsets everywhere under the seismic spread. This provides near-angles for shallow targets that are not sampled by the primary wavefield, enabling amplitude versus angle (AVA) analysis to be performed. In this study AVA results are used to characterize bright spots as a direct hydrocarbon indicator.