Super-virtual Interferometric Separation and Enhancement of Back-scattered Surface Waves

Abstract

Back-scattered surface waves can be migrated to detect near-surface reflectors with steep dips. A robust surface-wave migration requires the prior separation of the back-scattered surface-wave events from the data. This separation is often difficult to implement because the back-scattered surface waves are masked by the incident surface waves. We mitigate this problem by using a super-virtual interferometric method to enhance and separate the back-scattered surface waves. The key idea is to calculate the virtual back-scattered surface waves by stacking the resulting virtual correlated and convolved traces associated with the incident and back-scattered waves. Stacking the virtual back-scattered surface waves improves their signal-to-noise ratio and separates the back-scattered surface-waves from the incident field. Both synthetic and field data results validate the robustness of this method.