Seismic In the Arctic - Suppressing Seismic Noise Due to Vibrating Ice

A common problem encountered when processing seismic data obtained in Arctic environments is the presence of dispersive flexural wave noise on the data. Flexural wave noise is generated when seismic sources are detonated near, or at, ice sheets overlying shallow water in the transition zone from land to sea. As the waves are highly dispersive, have high magnitude and propagate with low velocities, processing of the data remains challenging due to frequent spatial aliasing effects.

Seismic processing was performed on two separate shot gathers: a real shot gather obtained during a test survey on Svalbard, Norway, and a full-waveform synthetic shot gather based on the same experiment. A processing work flow which suppressed the flexural wave noise, while preserving signals initially obscured, was developed. The work flow combines conventional τ-p filtering with the more unconventional radial trace (RT) filtering, and successfully increases the signal-to-noise ratio.