Bulletin of the Marine Geology (Aug 2017)
Practical Implementation of Multiple Attenuation Methods on 2D Deepwater Seismic Data : Seram Sea Case Study
Abstract
Some deepwater multiple attenuation processing methods have been developed in the past with partial success. The success of surface multiple attenuation relies on good water bottom reflections for most deepwater marine situations. It brings the bigger ability to build an accurate water bottom multiple prediction model. Major challenges on 2D deepwater seismic data processing especially such a geologically complex structure of Seram Sea, West Papua – Indonesia are to attenuate surface related multiple and to preserve the primary data. Many multiple attenuation methods have been developed to remove surface multiple on these seismic data including most common least-squares, prediction-error filtering and more advanced Radon transform. Predictive Deconvolution and Surface Related Multiple Elimination (SRME) method appears to be a proper solution, especially in complex structure where the above methods fail to distinguish interval velocity difference between primaries and multiples. It does not require any subsurface info as long as source signature and surface reflectivity are provided. SRME method consists of 3 major steps: SRME regularization, multiple modeling and least-square adaptive subtraction. Near offset regularization is needed to fill the gaps on near offset due to unrecorded near traces during the acquisition process. Then, isolating primaries from multiples using forward modeling. Inversion method by subtraction of input data with multiple models to a more attenuated multiple seismic section. Results on real 2D deepwater seismic data show that SRME method as the proper solution should be considered as one of the practical implementation steps in geologically complex structure and to give more accurate seismic imaging for the interpretation.