Utilizing Surface Multiples in sparse deepwater OBN surveys

Innovative seismic technologies enable us to achieve higher quality seismic images and reservoir models while reducing the cost of seismic acquisition and processing. A great example of these innovative methods is blended acquisition, in which multiple sources are firing within a shorter time window that result in significantly shorter acquisition time. The utilization of surface multiples, which can be considered as a natural form of blending is not yet very well established by the industry. However, recently much more attention has been drawn to the possibility of utilizing surface multiples in seismic imaging, rather than removing them. Surface multiples can be considered as secondary sources that illuminate the subsurface many times at different angles. Therefore, they have a significant potential to overcome the shortcomings of seismic acquisition by filling the illumination gaps resulting from imperfect acquisition, especially in sparse acquisition geometries. In this work we discuss the possibilities of improving the quality of seismic images in sparse node acquisition by utilizing surface multiples. We investigate two separate acquisition scenarios, namely, sparse node coverage and sparse node sampling. The impact of including surface multiples will be analyzed for these scenarios.