Deep water prestack multiple suppression on reflection data from ionian sea (offshore western greece)

Abstract

Multiple attenuation comprises a very important phase of the seismic reflection processing because it removes undesirable effects occurred during the propagation of the seismic signal in the earth. The present work aims at presenting the effectiveness of modern multiple suppression methods applied on streamer seismic reflection data. The seismic dataset represents an area with moderately dipping seafloor. The specific dataset was chosen in order to present the elimination of the water-column reverberations and internal multiples in dipping layers. Strong seafloor and internal multiples, lateral reflections and coherent noise impose difficulties in discriminating primary reflections in the seismic image of the present work. The prestack demultiple scheme combines wave equation method and deconvolution in order to predict and attenuate water-column reverberations and internal multiple reflections respectively. In particular, the region of moderately dipping seafloor chosen for the application of the proposed scheme images the Frontal Bulge in the outer Hellenic arc. The prestack demultiple method improved the quality of the stacked and migrated sections, by attenuating the majority of multiple reflections and extracting information about the structural units of the study area.