Towards better deblending – Application of wave equation based demigration

Most deblending approaches utilize coherency criteria in a certain domain to separate blended signals. Due to the presence of noise, such separation in the time domain can never be perfect. Conservative deblending is often performed in order to protect primary signals. As a consequence, residual source cross-talk noise can remain in the data after deblending, which could affect the subsequent pre-processing steps such as de-ghosting and de-multiple. Here, we present a wave equation-based demigration flow to help protect primary signals for deblending. It can be combined with existing deblending approaches to achieve clean deblended results with minimal primary damage. The workflow is tested on a numerically blended data set using acquired wide azimuth data. We also demonstrate its ability to overcome deblending challenges when the shots are coarsely sampled, and the dithering time is small.