Solutions for Scattered Surface-wave Attenuation in the Western Desert of Egypt

Land seismic data in areas with shallow hard layers, karsting, and other topographical irregularities can contain significant scattered energy. The recorded data are often dominated by the various types and modes of surface-wave noise that are difficult to attenuate with standard acquisition geometries and conventional processing techniques. In the Western Desert of Egypt, such surface waves and their scattered modes are a significant impediment to imaging and inversion. Successful removal of the scattered surface-wave energy will produce a data set with better fidelity in reflection amplitude and phase, leading not only to a better image with higher resolution, but also to data better conditioned for inversion. We present the results of an investigation into newly engineered processing technologies based on noise modeling and prediction that provide advantages over more conventional noise attenuation techniques for direct and scattered modes of surface waves. This work is performed through collaboration between WesternGeco and Apache focused on providing acquisition and processing solutions to the problem of the attenuation of direct and scattered surface waves.