Advances in radial trace domain coherent noise attenuation

The radial trace transform, introduced by Jon Claerbout and the Stanford Exploration Project, produces significant separation, in its coordinate space, of reflection signal and coherent noise. This allows effective attenuation of the noise using a variety of ordinary single trace operations in the radial trace domain. Recent experience has shown that one of the more effective techniques for coherent noise attenuation is to model the noise by applying a low-pass filter to the radial trace transform of an input gather, then to subtract the inverse transformed ‘modeled noise ’ from the original input gather. Interpolation is an integral part of the discrete radial trace transform. Several alternative interpolation algorithms are possible, however, and some can lead to better modelling of coherent noises in the radial trace domain for subsequent subtraction from the input. The Shaganappi high resolution seismic survey, appearing in earlier work to demonstrate radial trace noise attenuation, is utilised once again to illustrate the improved performance of current radial trace techniques and to compare results with those from more conventional K-F filtering