3D Prestack Land Data Enhancement Based on Nonlinear Beamforming in Cross-Spread Domain

Summary We present nonlinear beamforming (NLBF), a new method for enhancing 3D prestack land seismic data corrupted by challenging near-surface or overburden scattering. The method is based on the ideas of multidimensional stacking techniques such as common-reflection surface and multifocusing, but is designed specifically for modern 3D land seismic data. NLBF searches for local coherent nonlinear events in the data in the cross-spread domain and then performs beamforming along the estimated trajectories. We present details of the nonlinear beamforming algorithm and real-data examples showing the capabilities of the method. We expect NLBF to significantly streamline seismic processing of modern high-channel count and single-sensor data, and lead to improved images as well as better prestack data for estimation of reservoir properties.