Deblending and merging of 3D multi‐sweep seismic blended data

ABSTRACT Seismic blended source acquisition, also referred to as simultaneous source acquisition, is a cost‐effective technology that achieves a significant reduction in acquisition cycle time and increases seismic crew field productivity. The dispersed source array is a blended acquisition field technique that simultaneously employs sources emitting different types of sweeps (i.e. multi‐sweep), in terms of frequency bandwidth and length, which ultimately will result in a full broadband seismic data. In this paper, deblending of 3D multi‐sweep seismic blended data and the subsequent merging of the data volumes having different frequency bandwidths will be discussed. In specific data domains where the signal component is coherent, interference shots (i.e. blending noise) are randomly distributed in the data space according to its own shot firing time. Therefore, the deblending process, which separates interference shots from a signal component, becomes a noise attenuation problem. A sparse inversion methodology is applied in the frequency–wavenumber–wavenumber (f–kx–ky) domain to attenuate blending noise. By applying this deblending methodology to both dispersed source array's low‐ and mid‐high‐frequency bandwidths, we obtained high‐quality deblending results. For both frequency bandwidths of the deblended dispersed source array data, additional effort was made to combine the two datasets to a single broadband data volume. Consequently, deblending and merging of the dispersed source array blended data generated a broadband, deblended and well‐balanced seismic volume suitable for further processing and reservoir characterization applications.