Don’t Forget Your Shear Waves

Converted shear wave processing is often not routinely performed when processing 3-component Vertical Seismic Profile data. Shear energy can surprisingly occur when the source receiver offset is relatively small, and or when there is only a small amount of dip on reflectors. A number of VSP example datasets will be presented to demonstrate where 3-component processing delivers both valuable P and S-wave products. The examples illustrate that S-waves are a vital part of good 3-component VSP processing and are actually a bi-product of the P-wave processing.