Method and apparatus for doppler smear correction in marine seismology measurements

Abstract

A seismic system is provided with a method of reducing distortions caused by motion of a source and receiver in marine seismic measurements. In one embodiment, the seismic system comprises a seismic source, a seismic receiver, a source/receiver interface unit, a processing unit, a data storage unit, a display device, and a user input device. The processing unit is configured to receive seismic measurements from the seismic receiver and to create a seismic velocity model from the received data. The processing unit uses the velocity model to calculate a dilation function that is indicative of distortion caused by motion of the seismic source. Preferably, the processing unit corrects the seismic measurements for this distortion by computing a transform of the seismic measurements, partitioning the transformed measurements into "dip slices", inverse transforming the individual dip slices, correcting the dip slice measurements according to the dilation function, and adding the corrected dip slice measurements together to obtain the corrected seismic measurements. The disclosed system and method can advantageously provide for more accurate correction for source motion, which in turn yields seismic data having substantially reduced "smear" when ensemble averaging is performed to reduce seismic noise.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.