Swell noise attenuation using a cascade of F-X filter and median filter

Abstract

High-amplitude swell noises (HASN) are very difficult to eliminate from the marine seismic data. In this paper, we applied F-X filter and median filter in order to suppress HASN. Test data have been acquired on the northern offshore of the South Shetland Islands in December, 2010. Parts of data have been contaminated by HASN caused by bad weather during the cruise. We applied F-X filter and median filter to test data with HASN. After F-X filtering, most of noncoherent noises and small-amplitude swell noises are eliminated effectively but HASN are still remained significantly. With median filter, HASN was suppressed better than F-X filter, however some of non-coherent noises are still remains. We applied a cascade of two filters and results show HASN and non-coherent noises are suppressed effectively. After the cascade of two filtering, it is possible to define reflection layers clearly on the velocity spectrum and to produce better stacked section with a good signal-to-noise ratio.