Seismic forward modeling of acoustic surface-related order-separated multiples

Seismic surface-related multiples have become a hot topic of great significance due to the buried geological information provided by broader illumination areas than primaries. In recent years, researchers attempt to extract the hidden hint of multiples rather than treating them as noise and eliminating them directly. The elimination methods, e.g., the surface-related multiple elimination (SRME) and the inverse scattering series free-surface multiple elimination (ISS-FSME), may be affected by the overlapping or proximity of primaries and multiples. Typical imaging methods, e.g., the reverse time migration (RTM) and the least-square reverse time migration (LSRTM), suffer severe crosstalk artifacts from multiples of inappropriate order and smooth migration velocities. To study the characteristics of primaries and surface-related multiples, whether for elimination or imaging, we propose a forward modeling method of acoustic surface-related order-separated multiples established on the areal/virtual source assumption. The free surface is replaced with an absorbing surface under the dipole source approximation and the ghost creation approach. We present two reflection operators to approximate the reflection at the free surface and apply them to the areal source to obtain ideal results. Numerical experiments on three models prove the effectiveness of the proposed forward modeling method of acoustic surface-related order-separated multiples.