Derivation of Statistical Sea-surface Information from Dual-sensor Towed Streamer Data

Multi-component towed streamer data allow for separation of the up-going and down-going wavefields and, thus, sea-surface independent removal of the receiver side ghost. To achieve deghosting of conventional (pressure-only) data, assumptions about the sea-surface state have to be made in order to describe the deghosting operator. Typically, a flat free sea-surface with a reflection coefficient of −1 is assumed. Since wavefield separation from multi-component seismic towed streamer recordings can be performed independently of the sea-surface state, the latter can be inferred from the data. In this paper, we show a method to derive statistical information about the sea-surface state from separated wavefields. We will extract the statistical ghost operator from the data and derive parameter values fitting a sea-surface model. The extracted statistical ghost operator will be compared to actual ghost operators found in the data.