Wide‐azimuth techniques for processing high density 3D OBC data

High density wide-azimuth Ocean Bottom Cable acquisitions have proven their efficiency to better image complex structures in the North Sea. Yet conventional preprocessing sequences have not taken into account the full potential offered by such acquisitions (Boelle et al. 2008). In this paper, we present the advantages of a true wideazimuthal pre-processing regarding noise attenuation, PZ summation in the 3D τ-px-py domain, following Soudani et al. (2006), and multiple attenuation in the 3D τ-qx-qy parabolic radon domain as proposed by Hugonnet et al. (2008). The wide-azimuthal information can also be used to build the velocity model following a multi-azimuth strategy. The wide azimuth processing results are compared to more conventional processing approaches in a real case study.