LAUSR

Unwanted interference noise often causes problems during seismic reflection data acquisition and processing. In this paper we present two novel data‐regrouping methods that enable improved shot‐to‐shot coherent interference noise attenuation in marine seismic data. The two approaches are based on line mixing and/or shot skipping: (1) for a 3‐D marine seismic reflection data acquisition which is typically carried out by shooting closely spaced parallel lines, we propose to mix the shot gathers from two adjacent sail lines to break up shot‐to‐shot coherent noise. This approach takes advantage of the fact that adjacent sail lines are usually acquired with a significant time interval, resulting in different types of noise; (2) for a 2‐D/3‐D acquisition, we propose an algorithm to skip and reorder the original shots to decrease the continuity of the shot‐to‐shot coherent noise. This approach could also supply more aperture data for the first or last shot from both sides, which is beneficial for the coherent noise removal at the edge area. After regrouping the original data, the coherent noise can then be further randomized or isolated by sorting and transforming to other domains, typically the common p‐shot domain where a random noise attenuation tool could be applied to identify and attenuate such noise. Field data examples confirm the effectiveness of the methods.