Wave Equation Based Deghosting of OBC Data

Towed streamer operations in congested areas lead to gaps in 3D coverage making the OBC (Ocean Bottom Cable) method employing detectors on the ocean bottom a necessity. In order to ensure that high quality seismic data is obtained using this method one has to address the problem of water column reverberation at the acquisition stage itself. Every primary arrival at a detector location is followed by secondary arrivals due to reverberation of the seismic energy between the water surface and water bottom. If the water depth is small (typically below 10m), the time gap between the primary and secondary arrivals is small and the undesired secondaries can be removed by deconvolution algorithms.