Paper Summary

Seismic interference (SI) still is a considerable problem in marine seismic acquisitions. Looking at the number of marine seismic surveys that are acquired in close vicinity of each other nowadays, seismic interference forces to either acquire surveys in time-sharing mode or apply substantial processing schemes to attenuate the SI-energy afterwards. Looking at the characteristics and challenges of SI-energy, we see that it is very much related to the deblending challenges faced in simultaneous source acquisitions. Just like the interfering simultaneous sources, which are fired with dithered firing-times, the SI energy show irregular behaviour from shot to shot. Considering the resemblance between the two, it seems natural to treat blending- and SIenergy in one and the same algorithm. In this paper it is discussed how an inversion-based source separation method is extended to include SI-energy as well. The extended method is applied to simultaneous long offset (SLO) field data which is contaminated by SI. Good results are obtained for both source separation and SI attenuation.