Examples of deep-water-bottom multiple dereverberation techniques applied to seismic-reflection data from the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf

Seismic-reflection data recorded in deep water over the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf are often dominated by multiply-reflected seismic energy. This energy reverberates between the surface of the water and the seafloor (or other strong reflectors), and makes portions of the seismic data completely useless. Several different data-processing techniques can be applied to partially suppress these multiples and enhance the interpretability of the data. These techniques include (1) the three-point operator, (2) predictive deconvolution, (3) near-trace muting, (4) spatially variant bandpass filters, (5) Nth root stack, and (6) trace distance weighting. Application of these methods to several seismic lines indicates that trace distance weighting is the most useful method studied for suppressing deep-water-bottom multiples for data from the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf.