Improving the plane-wave destruction method by parameterizing the local slope for VSP wavefield separation

High-precision seismic exploration has attracted a great deal of attention. Vertical seismic profiles have the advantages of high exploration accuracy and ideal imaging effects, making them an effective tool for mine exploration. The separation of upgoing and downgoing waves is a vital step in vertical seismic profile processing. However, wavefield separation processing in the frequency–wavenumber domain often leads to aliasing in the time–distance domain. In addition, it is likely to result in incomplete wavefield separation in the sparse domain because of inaccurate threshold selection. As an effective time–distance domain wavefield separation method, the plane-wave destruction method can effectively avoid these problems. However, the traditional local slope estimation in plane-wave destruction is data-driven, making it difficult to distinguish linear upgoing and downgoing waves. Therefore, the velocity-based local slope parameterization method is proposed to construct a plane-wave destruction filter that can be used to separate the vertical seismic profile wavefield. Synthetic and field data show that the proposed separating strategy has higher separation accuracy than traditional methods when separating the upgoing and downgoing waves of vertical seismic profile data.