Imaging and suppressing near-receiver scattered surface waves

When traveling through a complex overburden, upcoming seismic body waves can be disturbed by scattering from local heterogeneities. Currently, surface-consistent static and amplitude corrections correct for rapid variations in arrival times and amplitudes of a reflector, but these methods impose strong assumptions on the near-surface model. Observations on synthetic and laboratory experiments of near-surface scattering with densely sampled data suggest that removing noise from near-receiver scattering requires multichannel approaches rather than single-channel, near-surface corrections. In this paper we develop a wavefield-based imaging method to suppress surface waves scattered directly beneath the receivers. Using an integral-equation formulation, we account for near-surface heterogeneities by a surface impedance function. This impedance function is used to model scattered surface waves, excited by upcoming wavefronts. The final step in our algorithm is to subtract the scattered surface waves. We successfully apply this method to laboratory data of scattered surface waves, excited and monitored with a noncontacting acquisition system.