Source-Receiver Interferometric Redatuming Using Sparse Buried Receivers to Address Complex Near-Surface Environments: A Case Study of Seismic Imaging Quality and Time-Lapse Repeatability

Deploying sparse sources and receivers in a complex near-surface environment for seismic imaging and monitoring remains a challenge. Complicated near-surface structures with strong lateral velocity variations and thick weathering layers distort seismic wave paths and produce strong reverberations and scattering. Consequently, acquisition with a buried receiver system below the weathering layer is preferred for land surveys, but the cost of this approach is excessively high in real applications. To mitigate this problem, we propose a source-receiver interferometry-based redatuming method that can generate redatumed data beneath the near surface with a reduced cost. The new acquisition geometry consists of dense surface and sparse buried receivers. The workflow based on source-receiver redatuming combines surface and buried systems by cross correlating direct waves recorded by buried receivers with the corresponding reflected waves recorded by surface receivers. The approach transforms surface source-receiver records into virtually buried source-receiver records. We effectively suppress the acquisition noises associated with the near-surface structures because the proposed technique generates redatumed data below the weathering layer. We apply dip-guided interpolation to the redatumed data to make the geometry consistent with the original surface geometry. The resulting records not only improve the seismic image quality and repeatability compared with the original records but also have a lower cost than a denseburied acquisition system. We use 13 seismic surveys carried out at different times to demonstrate the feasibility and advantage of the proposed method.