An inversion approach to separating sources in marine simultaneous shooting acquisition - application to a Gulf of Mexico data set

The simultaneous firing of marine sources can provide a significant uplift in terms of acquisition efficiency and data quality enhancement. However, the seismic interference resulting from one or more other sources needs to be well understood and the appropriate processing strategies need to be developed for the method to fulfil its promise. In this paper, a modified inversion approach is presented for the effective separation of sources in marine simultaneous shooting acquisition. The method aims to distribute all energy in the simultaneous shot records by reconstructing the individual shot records at their respective locations. The method is applied to a wide azimuth data set acquired in the Gulf of Mexico where two sources out of four in total were fired simultaneously. Results demonstrate that the individual sources can be separated satisfactory, both at the prestack and post-stack level.