Imaging the Volve ocean-bottom field data with the upside-down Rayleigh–Marchenko method

SUMMARY Ocean-bottom seismic acquisitions are gaining widespread popularity across a variety of subsurface applications. However, the high cost of these systems often necessitates receiver geometries with large intervals between ocean-bottom cables or nodes. The upside-down Rayleigh–Marchenko (UD–RM) method has been recently proposed as an effective solution for accurate redatuming and imaging of sparse seabed data. In this paper, we present the first successful application of the UD–RM method to field data. We demonstrate that in the presence of a shallow seabed, an improved data pre-processing workflow is necessary to generate more accurate input wavefields compared to the one produced by the workflow presented in the original paper. To validate the proposed processing workflow, the UD–RM method is initially tested on a synthetic data set that mimics the Volve field data (referred to as the Volve synthetic data set); this is followed by its application to a 2-D line of the Volve ocean-bottom cable data set. Subsequently, the field data set is subsampled by retaining only 25 per cent of the total receivers to numerically validate the UD–RM method’s capability to handle sparse receiver arrays. The resulting images reveal that the UD–RM method, when paired with our enhanced data processing workflow, can effectively handle surface-related multiples, internal multiples, and sparse receiver arrays, producing accurate imaging results without the need for costly and labour-intensive multiple removal processes. Finally, we provide theoretical insights and numerical evidence supporting the necessity of source-side deghosting prior to redatuming. While a pre-processing workflow that omits source-side deghosting can offer some practical advantages, we show that this ultimately produces blurrier images compared to those obtained using source-side deghosted input data.